Slide copier like Nikon ES-1, ES-2

A simplified device inspired by the Nikon ES-1 slide copier. This is made specifically to fit my Nikon 60mm / 2.8 Macro autofocus lens. 

Prints in 3 pieces. 

The "lens" part is designed to be permanently fitted over a 62mm lens filter. You can glue it on if you want, or you can adjust the size/extrusion for a good friction fit. Then the filter is screwed fully into the camera lens. 

The second, biggest part, is a friction-fit over the lens part. You can adjust the rotation of the slides perfectly by rotating it on the lens part. If needed, you can lock it in place with a rubber band or a strip of tape. This is not intended to be a length adjustment, but you can adjust the length by adjusting the Z scaling in the slicer. 

The third part is the clip that goes on the end. It holds a standard 50mm x 50mm by 1.3mm slide mount into a consistent position. It's designed so that slides can be exchanged quickly, and so that they are all held in exactly the same place. Instead of allowing a loose fit, so that you have adjustment to get each slide perfectly positioned, like clips on the actual ES-1, this design is intended to quickly position every slide in the same exact place each time so they can quickly be copied without a lot of fiddling. I adjust the magnification to allow a little bit of the slide mount to be visible in the final image. It is easy to batch-crop the resulting images later if needed. For me, it is more important to capture the whole image and to do it quickly and consistently. I don't want to have to micro-adjust each slide. I put the camera on a tripod and tip it up at an angle so you can pretty much just drop a slide in and trigger the shutter. 

Length is adjusted to fit my Nikon 60mm f/2.8 AF-D lens on my D300s DX-format camera. The magnification captures the entire mounted slide and a small amount of the slide mount which can optionally be cropped out later. To adjust magnification, change Z-scaling in the slicer. To adjust the friction fits, adjust X and Y scaling in the slicer in 0.25% increments to achieve a snug fit. Use super glue if you want to commit to a filter.  

You can use autofocus on every slide, or you can just pre-focus. Autofocus on this camera is slow, so I tend to use f/11 and use the same focus for every slide. 

Testing shows that f/5.6 doesn't have enough depth of field to handle film curvature. f/32 causes noticeable softness, so f/11 and f/16 are best. F/8 would probably be best if you are going to focus on each slide. 

Notice that I don't have any light diffuser. This is also to make exchanging slides easier. I find that pointing the camera at a white wall works fine. You could probably point it out a window or something. I prefer to use flash because it gives lots of light for high shutter speeds and has good color balance. Using fixed lights works too, but shutter speeds are a little slow at f/11. Because the device is attached to the lens, camera shaking even at 1/2 second doesn't seem to be a problem, but I just like shooting at flash sync speeds and native ISO. 

For metering, you can use the camera's built-in flash and matrix metering, and white balance. Then the camera will adjust for different slide exposures, and different color balance casts of the slides themselves, just like it would for different real-world scenes. This is what I generally do, because I don't mind the camera doing some correction on each slide. But if you are more of an archivalist, you could use a fixed white balance and exposure in order to capture the actual color cast or brightness/darkness of the individual slides. 

I shoot jpegs because I'm not looking to do a lot of RAW conversion on hundreds of slides. I'm just trying to quickly digitize slides, many of which are worthless anyway. The work is in the content editing. If I find one I want to make an enlargement of, can go back and re-scan it in raw or send it out for a better scan. 

My camera also makes linear TIFFs, which could be better for post-processing than jpegs, but my camera only produces 8 bit TIFFs which probably has no advantage over JPG because TIFFs are generally linear brightness while 8-bit JPG at least stores brightness on a gamma curve.