With my interest in vintage and antique images, I have collected a number of glass magic lantern slides over the years, predominately as the fragile decorative squares are interesting curios on their own, but I did entertain the idea of projecting them in a magic lantern projector. I have managed to acquire two homemade devices, neither of which are fully operational and missing parts, so in the interim, I have been trying to get a good capture of the images on the slides themselves.
Scanning proved problematic, as the flatbed scanner I borrowed would only run on Windows XP, so I had to resort to a simpler method. By placing the slide against a window on a bright day, I re-photographed it with my phone. Importing it into Photoshop, I straightened the image, and trimmed off the frames. Then I dropped them into Lightroom, to adjust the tonality and spot out a few major blemishes. I could have removed every spot or mark, but a completely pristine image would not have the same sense of age that the originals do, so I stayed my hand.
The slides that I used included the very first pair I bought on ebay, from Liverpool's Sefton Park, which I wanted for nostalgic reasons more than anything. The others I have picked up at various car boots or vintage fairs for a few pounds. The two colour ones are comparatively modern and measure 7 cm on a side, as opposed to the older ones at 8 cm square. The ships deck slide has been hand tinted to add a little colour, but I rendered it in monochrome to bring out the detail.
Neither of the 7cm colour slides have any notes or titling on them and appear to show a scene at a Mediterranean harbour. The colour has degraded slightly and veered towards the red, so I made a best guess estimate on colour correction.
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| 'Sefton Park, Liverpool Feb 11 1889' |
My two favourite slides are the Sefton Park pair, bought separately, but showing the same general area within a three year period. The first one has a circular mask and shows part of the lake in Sefton Park, Liverpool, under a heavy fall of snow in February 1889. A dapper gentleman pauses to have the moment recorded on a nearby bench. In the background can be seen a railway bridge an the chimneys of the large victorian houses beyond the trees. As a child, I visited the park often, as it was a large sprawling place, with a small aviary, boating lake, a beautiful brass statue of Peter Pan and a wooden model of the Jolly Roger floating on the lake. Central to the park was the once beautiful Palm House, a large cross shaped conservatory with a huge glass dome. As a boy, the Palm House was invariably closed and I could only ever peer through the windows at the lush growths inside. As it gradually fell into disrepair over the years, a petition was raised to save it and in the 1980's, it was largely restored. Today it is fully repaired and used as a function suite, with some minimal tropical planting inside.
The second slide that I have appears to show a glimpse of a visiting party of a wealthy gentleman and his three young charges, watched over warily by one of the staff, during the official open day. The whole building was constructed with a steel frame and thousands of individual panes of glass, emulating the London Crystal Palace on a much smaller scale. Tropical plants and trees sprung up everywhere and the air inside was heavy with moisture. In later years, as the glass panes fell in, birds nested in the branches and among the ironwork, becoming a small haven for wildlife.
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'Interior of Sefton Park - Conservatory 1896'
Snap shot by T.G June, Stoneycroft
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| 'The Hardanger Fjord, Norway' |
The other few slides are far less romantic and interesting, but I bought them simply for the curiosity value. They may be related, as the ship in the first one is sailing on a Norwegian fjord and the others appear to show glaciers and a Swiss mountain stream.
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| 'Glacial Moraine - Grindelwald' |
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| 'Oie - view from P & S' |
I have a considerable number of other slides to capture, some landscapes and some wildlife. Now that I have identified an adequate method of recording them, I will begin documenting the contents too.
