By richard seah

3 May 2008

A combination of ignorance and neglect meant that some of my best and most precious slides were also my worst. They were in the worst possible state, covered not only with dust and dirt but with fungus as well.

Many were discolored, either with a strong blue/cyan tint or splattered with blotches of bright blue in areas where the film emulsion had been eroded - possibly by acids from finger prints that had perspiration and oils.

One particularly blotchy slide, of a young boy smoking cigarettes, was found - upon closer examination under bright lights and visible with naked eyes - to harbor a colony of tiny multi-legged creatures. Most were taking shelter underneath the slide mounting and the colony came complete with eggs, carcasses and feces!

What do you expect from slides that had been sitting in a storeroom for over 20 years in a hot and humid tropical climate?

In Singapore where I live, we have a word for such a condition: terok. Even though the word ends with 'ok', it means far from ok. When something is really, really bad, we say it's terok. My slides were terok.

Most were, in fact, thrown away. Luckily, I had the good sense to keep the best and the most precious. Yet unluckily, I also had the bad sense to entrust one lot of them to a virtual stranger who said she was in the business of selling art and had offered to market my photographs. I never heard from her after I handed her my cherished slides. When I finally inquired more than a year later, she said she threw them away when she moved house. How could an artists' agent have such callous disregard for another person's art?

But I have to move on. And I thank God and the universe that my absolute favorite images are still with me.

These past weeks (I am writing this in April 2008), that sense of gratefulness has been greatly enhanced because a new-found friend has been helping me to restore my slides, using both hardware and software. He cleaned the slides, removed the fungus, re-scanned them into high resolution files and used Adobe Photoshop to correct the colors and patch up the flaws.

It's not an easy task. Some months back, I invested no small sum of money on a bottle of PEC-12 cleaning solution and a packet of PEC pads, but they did not seem to work well. I discovered that PEC-12 was just one of a whole arsenal of chemicals that my friend used.

As he emailed to me batches of six to eight images each time, it has been a series of one "Wow!" after another. Never before had I see my images looking the way they do now. Never had I thought such quality was possible.

My first slide scans were most discouraging. Back in 2002, I was building my first website and I wanted to show off some of my photographs. Not knowing any better, I simply took my slides to one of the many color labs in the shopping malls.

The scans were terok. Some were so dark that hardly anything could be seen. And, they came in strange colors. One slide of terracotta water jars came out looking bluish purple. Yet the owner of the lab, who had a young girl doing the scans, insisted the colors were accurate. He seemed sincere. Either he truly could not discern the differences or he was a damn good actor! He re-scanned the slides for free.

Not good... still terok.

Slightly wiser from that experience, I next took my slides to a "professional" lab. The results were marginally better but still far from good. Again, the lab offered to re-scan for free. This time round, they scanned the Kodachrome slides separately from the Ektachrome, telling me that the Kodachrome slides had denser colors and needed a different setting.

There was another marginal improvement. I posted on my website those images that were more or less ok - even though some had hundreds of small black specks of dirt all over. I kept the rest.

It took me another year to discover Fotohub, one of the best professional labs in Singapore - and also to discover that all labs offer a choice of lower resolution 4-base and higher resolution 16-base scans. Fotohub's prices were higher, but their scans were much better. I was happy.

Meanwhile, I learned to use Adobe Photoshop and discovered ways of salvaging some of the more terok images, for example, by balancing the strange colors or else converting them to black and white altogether.

I lived with this situation. Finally, I went digital in November 2007 with a Fujifilm S5 Pro DSLR camera. The cost and hassle of buying, developing and scanning slides was getting to me.

I was happy to bid farewell to slide scanning... until I met another S5 Pro owner Larry through the local photography forum. We became good friends and teh halia (ginger tea) drinking buddies. One day, Larry mentioned that he had a dedicated film scanner and offered to scan some of my old slides. I did not want to impose on a friend.

But I had always wondered... could my images have been better?

All but one of the scans Larry did turned out very much better. The exception was an image of an Indian girl holding a stalk of artificial rose. It turned out very much darker than before. Larry explained that brightening the image would accentuate digital noise, as patches of it had "no pixels left to salvage".

My feedback touched a raw nerve, however. For it drew out the frustration that Larry felt within. His scanner, although good, was old and had limitations. He could not afford to buy a new one, hence the frustration.

But technology has advanced and some of the affordable (at least not prohibitively priced) scanners are said to be very good. Two days later, Larry took that slide of the Indian girl to test drive a new scanner. He emailed me the image later that afternoon and I said it was very impressive.

I did not realise that Larry was far more impressed than I. He had bought the scanner that same afternoon!

I asked Larry if he would re-scan just a few of my best images with his new 'toy'. He was reluctant at first as he had thousands of his own slides to scan and archive. But he, too, was curious.

The next day, Larry very excitedly telephoned to ask me to check my email. He had re-scanned just three images. The first that appeared was one called Bali Blessings, which shows the hand of a Balinese priest holding a marigold flower and some incense sticks.

I could not believe my eyes. I replied with a WOW! big enough to fill this entire page. I cannot thank my precious friend Larry enough... not even if I buy him teh halia for life.

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