I just bought a second hand slide projector. Against my advice an Aussie friend convinced hubs to shoot slides, early in our travels. But we didn’t own a projector, so we rented, from time to time. We looked into buying one, a few times, but they were very spendy at the time. So our slides sat, unwatched in trays, gathering dust! Literally through decades. From time to time he tries to show me some in the tiny viewer thingy, but I hate that. Ugh. Camera stores that rented and sold such things are long gone. Over the last few years I’ve searched around seeing if maybe I could find one second hand, but never had any luck. Hadn’t thought to look again in ages and ages. Gave it a go last night and found exactly what I was looking for, I was stunned! It’s on its way should be here just after Christmas! Fingers crossed, but I think he’ll be over the moon!(Just double checked I didn’t pitch out the folding screen during the great attic purge a few years ago! Colour me relieved!)
My parents finally had enough money to do the middle-class vacation thing right at the heyday of slide projectors. It was VERY common for them to drag their kids along to another family’s house for a “dinner party”… with each kid helping lug a screen, boxes of those carousels, and an inordinately heavy projector.
Well, one time my dad’s best friend invited us all for dinner. And added “Oh, Mrs. B wants you to bring slides of your latest trip.”
My dad replied “That’d be great! We just motored through Virginia and Pennsylvania, and I’ve got lots of slides of Civil War battle sites!”
“Well, that sounds exciting…[sarcasm] How many slides do you have?” “Oh, 'bout a hundred…”
“Well, bring your best one.”
After dinner (but we had to watch the long slide show before dessert), my dad got all the equipment set up and we finally got to see a slide of our family standing by a fully-packed station wagon.
And my dad just sat there with a funny expression. Finally, someone asked “Are you going to change the slide?” “To what?” replied my dad, "I was told to bring our best slide."
Mr. B laughed. “Good one, I do hope you have the rest out in the car.” “Nope, I just brought our best slide.”
My dad was a perfectionist with an artist’s eye, so he never showed a substandard pic. He also believed slides shows should be interactive. I was disappointed by other dad’s shows, let me tell you.
When I taught photography in the 80s, I would sometimes use slide projection in an interactive way. Students seemed to enjoy that.
I am a commercial photographer for several decades now, and write for a few magazines. I still teach a little, but 98% is online.
You’ve heard of it now, then. My mom often (well, not recently, of course) has slide-show parties after her travels around the world (exact format varying, depending on the equipment we have available).
Slide shows reached their heyday in the late 70’s and early 80’s, except we called them “multimedia” presentations. They were quite popular for large scale corporate events or as standing presentations of the sort one might see at a museum. Some were very elaborate, entailing the use of dozens of individual projectors and thousands of slides, synchronized via primitive computers or a tape player. Usually, a tape would play back audio tracks for the program as well as inaudible “control” tracks that synchronized the projectors.
Animation was possible by very quickly changing images of multiple projectors in sequence. Other tricks involved rotating polarizing filters to quickly alternate the viewable output of multiple projectors thereby creating “chase” effects. Slides were “pin registered” to allow very precise and repeatable alignment of images from slide to slide and projector to projector.
Unfortunately, even using professional grade equipment run by professionals, it was still a very “Rube Goldbergian” process. These projectors would sometimes jam. A presentation could instantly become a disaster if a machine jammed at a crucial point in the program. To mitigate such misfortune there were usually “synch points” built into the program where things could be shut down and restarted without the audience noticing (too much). It was also usual to have several technicians hovering over the banks of projectors ready to fix things on the fly.
Until high quality video projection became possible in the late 80’s, this was the only way to fill a large screen or multiple screens economically with compelling content. When everything worked, these shows were absolutely jaw-dropping works of beauty. But I still have nightmares of a few shows that crashed and burned.
The few memories I have are of upside down slides and the wired remote that would either fail to advance the carousel or actually make it go in reverse when you clicked forward. Also, if the pictures were taken by a crappy photographer, making them a hundred times bigger did nothing to improve them. There was also a bit of a stereotype back in the day of sadistic hosts dragging out the projector after dinner and subjecting their guests to hours of boredom.
That was what I did for a living back then! Almost no one understands what that field even was…
You didn’t work for 2100 Productions, did you? We perfected the “works of beauty that crashed and burned”.
I remember our paper tape processor going down during a 24-projector show, and having to flutter our fingers in front of the lenses to mimic a fade…oh, never mind, this is too “niche” for real people to care about…
Whenever I saw the portable screen set up in the living room, I’d look with trepidation to see what type of projector Dad had set up for the show. That could make, or break the evening for young me.
Movie projector? Ok, cool. We had some funny 8mm home movies. And, best of all, there weren’t too many of them. Heck, this presentation will be over before The Beverly Hillbillies show starts on TV!
Slide projector? Bummer. Dad had an endless stack of carousels filled with boring slides. Mostly multiple slides of the same subject shot at slightly different angles. It’s gonna be a looong night. No Beverly Hillbillies for me tonight.
View-master Projector? Egad, NO! What could be worse than viewing dozens of disks, filled with photos of boring places and people I don’t know, though a stereoscopic viewer? Answer: seeing the same boring photos without the stereoscopic effect, projected on a screen. < sarcasm> What 6-year-old boy wouldn’t love that?< /sarcasm>
My sister bicycled across Canada, and had a slide show of her trip – I liked it.
Another sister has had many trips – she takes a lot of pictures as she is a watercolor artist. She thankfully edited her slide show so we didn’t see 23 shots of the same group of flowers from slightly different angles.
Lately of course there aren’t physical slides, but JPEGs displayed on TV screens. I guess I’m lucky in that all the recent ones I have seen have been interesting to me.
My family was friends with a portrait photographer in my hometown. He spent a family vacation in Florida and took photos of a Apollo launch at Cape Canaveral. It was 16 or 17 (1972). My parents and I visited his home for dinner and slide show. He had some amazing shots taken from the public viewing area.
I can definitely understand the boredom of viewing family photos. In my case, however, my uncle happened to be a professional photographer, and the photos were really amazing. Just so well done. And they weren’t boring family photos… they were photos of lakes, oceans, and people on boats.
Movies are MUCH more expensive and time consuming to produce especially if you are to maintain high production values. But the biggest advantage to multimedia is the ease and speed of editing due to the nonlinear and modular nature of the beast. It takes only a few seconds to swap a couple slides around. We could even make changes in the middle of a show while it’s running! We would go so far as to prepare alternative “chunks” to be dropped into the show on-the-fly. Not recommended but doable and we’ve done it. You can never say “no” or “we can’t do that” in corporate media work. Indecisive clients and last minute changes are the norm.
Unlike slides, movie film is very linear. There’s a defined beginning, middle and end that must play out in that order. You can’t really take a film off the projector to edit it once it’s up and running. Well… actually you can… sorta… Lemme tell you about my days as a television film projectionist when news was shot on film as opposed to video tape. I was the master of the masking tape splice
No, never heard of them. I worked for a place called Optics and Images in Green Bay, WI. We had some national level clients. Except for one, they got bought up or merged out of existence long ago. But you still see big orange semi trucks on highways all over the country. Orange was our favorite color
