Scanning New Zealand
Ben Kepka shares a tiny portion of the immense slide library bequeathed to him by his great uncle. Scanning New Zealand is a mammoth task and you might just be able to help Ben with this amazing project.
Towards the end of 2018 my great uncle Zygmunt (Zyg) Kepka passed away. Together with my Grandfather Ian Kepka they moved to New Zealand as refugees from World War II as the Russian troops made their way across Poland.
When settling in New Zealand, they both worked in the construction industry. My Grandfather Ian founded a design and build construction company in the North Island while Zyg headed down south.
He first came to Fiordland in 1957 as a contract carpenter for DOC, renovating and expanding Quintin Lodge on the Milford Track. When this project was complete, he spent a further 10 years there as a guide and helped maintain the tracks.
Breathtaking
He was an avid photographer, capturing his life with different Leicas during this rarely immortalized time in New Zealand history. He would shoot solely with Leica cameras at the time, as they were light, reliable and sturdy.
In 1953, Zyg bought his first camera, a Zeiss Ikon and quickly discovered a passion for photography. His second camera was a Leica M3 and from that point onwards, he was a committed Leica shooter. He slowly progressed through the M series and eventually the R series (SLR) in parallel. At this point, I think it’s safe to say he was a bona fide photographer.
Zyg would hike up and down some of the most breathtaking landscapes in the world on a daily basis, taking photos as he went. He began climbing the surrounding mountains by himself, slowly becoming a local mountaineering legend.
Chamois
One day, as he climbed a local Mountain (Mt Elliot), Zyg came across a Chamois, a species of goat. It was one of the first sightings of its kind in this part of New Zealand. As he climbed Mt Elliot the Chamois took off across a secondary peak. As he followed it along this unnamed peak, taking pictures, it disappeared out of sight.
He documented the sighting with the local guides they realised that this peak was unnamed. As a result they started calling it “Zyg’s mountain”. One of the guides then officially registered it as Mt Kepka and it remains so to this day. He’s standing atop Mt Kepka with Mt Elliot in the background in the featured image above.
If you are ever walking in the area around the Eyre Mountains chances are will be staying in a hut built by Zyg.
Thousands of slides
He always said the only reason he climbed was to take photos. Over the years he spent a small fortune on film and photographic equipment, amassing a collection of tens of thousands of slides of the New Zealand southern alpine region throughout this era.
His story is incredible. Uncle Zyg inspired me to take up photography over 20 years ago now, and to this day I am still attempting to fill those shoes. I even had the pleasure of teaching him Lightroom before his passing. He said, “I can’t imagine why you shoot film when you have something like this” as his eyes lit up.
On his passing, I inherited around 50,000 slides taken in and around this region and am slowly making my way through scanning them. The further I get through this mountain of slides, the more I felt compelled to share them with the world.
The goal is to add a section to my website, Cultured Kiwi, dedicated to Uncle Zyg. As I have lived abroad for the past 8 years, most of my focus has been on places throughout the world. It would be aimed at recommending trails and areas to visit in New Zealand using historical photography and stories from where they originated.
Help required
At present I am living in London, and the slides are slowly being shipped over in small batches to avoid any major loss. But I would like to put a question out to the audience of Japan Camera Hunter to ask if any of you have experience with a task like this? Are there any services that might be able to scan a large number of files like this library?
So, thanks for reading. I know it’s a bit of a different story, but hopefully it might inspire a few of you to dig through those old slides and start uncovering stories of your own (just like we have done with Rescued Memories).
Thanks for sharing this stunning work with us, Ben. I hope the readers of JCH can help. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.
JCH
Beautiful.
incredible, thanks for sharing with us!
I have been working on a similar project. My father shot around 3000 slides between 1955 and 1978. Upon acquiring these slides around 2012, I viewed all and reduced the number down to between 300-500. I saved only those slides that interested me (about 98% with family members). I bought a Plustek slide scanner intending to scan the 300-500 slides. This turned out to be a terrible idea. The Plustek took about 30 seconds to scan a slide. That was way too long. Add to that the scanning software that came with the Plustek is TERRIBLE!!!!! So I set this project aside.
Late last year I bought a Nikon Z6, Nikon Micro (macro) lens and the ES2 slide holder. Shooting the slides this was far more efficient than the scanner. What you give up shooting the slides this way is a bit of resolution. However, considering my father used manual focus rangefinder cameras during this period, the final resolution is “good enough”.
I found the Nikon Z6 to be a very inaccurate camera and I soon sold it. I replaced the Z6 with a D7500. The D7500 is an order of magnitude superior to the Z6.
Finally, here is the text of an email I’ve recently sent to some folks detailing the status of this project…
Thus far I have shot about 60 slides from 1955 – 1963. I have processed slides through 1961 or about 50 slides. The Nikon D7500 is working as well as can be expected. It is not the level of reproduction that a slide scanner would provide but the convenience of shooting 10 slides in the time it takes to scan one slide far outweighs the minor loss of reproduction quality.
I was debating what to do with the slide images once done. Book? Prints? What?
I decided I would initially make prints. But I wanted a more “authentic” print than I would get from my Epson 3880 (and that printer is dying so I will probably replace it at the end of summer when summer travel season concludes).
It came to me that, in say 1959, my father would have taken the Kodachrome film for development to the local drug store. He might have also ordered prints along with the slides. The prints would have been 3.5×5 inch in size printed on glossy photo paper. This gave me the idea that the most authentic reproduction would be small 4×6 Dye Sub prints (no one makes 3.5×5 inch paper anymore).
I bought a Canon Selphy portable dye sub printer (model CP1300) from B&H for $99. I bought a print kit (dye sub “ink” + paper; enough to print 100+ images) for another $25. Add $5 more for a pack of 100 acid free 4×6 sleeves.
I’ve printed about 25 photos thus far and the results are really good. The only issues I’ve had thus far is the printer uses only 3 colors; yellow, cyan and magenta. No black. Blacks look very good but many shots printed with a cyan cast. So I have to dial the cyan way back in the image. Not a problem.
The other issue is the printer works best when the prints have the sRGB profile imbedded. Actually not an issue if I elect to make a book. Many of the book making services require the images sent to them to be in the sRGB color space. A happy accident.
This has been a very satisfying project. I like the Kodachrome slides. I can’t imagine 60+ years from now anyone will be able to reprint digital shots I’ve taken and saved in the DNG format. A lot of history will be lost. But will anyone care?
I’m not sure you will read any of this but if you do, I hope this info is helpful.
Thanks for the wonderful story. Regarding my experience scanning, I just went through a multi year project to digitize all negatives of family photos taken over 20 years. It was around 100 rolls, so roughly 3000 pictures. I initially started with a Canon 9000f flatbed but the 2 strips per scan was too slow. Eventually upgraded to an Epson V800 and did 4 strips at a time but was still a lot of waiting around. What got me across the finish line was switching to DSLR scanning where I could digitize a frame in seconds. But for you quantity it might still be too much. If your slides are mounted, I have seen people online rig a slide projector without its lens, and time lapse shooting on a DSLR which could blow through a tray of slides in seconds. Definitely worth investigating and building for 50,000 slides.
http://www.digmypics.com/slidescanning.aspx?g=slide%20scanning&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxYLoBRCxARIsAEf16-txQloz9B_nSkLqI4f0Vtlcr_eqoZUqojvpncWMCHadbBtax7E_gBwaAqAUEALw_wcB
Also, scancafe.com
An interesting story and worthy of sharing. I have just one nitpicking thing; a chamois is from the antelope family and your writer may have confused it with a tahr. The chamois is native to the European Alps. Cheers.