The Greg Schlack Project

If you were in a band in Colorado in the 1980's or 1990's, you almost certainly were photographed by Greg Schlack.  If you graduated high school in Boulder during that time, or up until 2010, the chances were pretty good that Greg shot your senior pictures.

Greg lived his entire life in the house he grew up in, so he was always easy to find, and a constant fixture around Boulder for several decades.  He passed away suddenly in 2009, leaving behind a vast array of friends and clients who have missed him, his humor, and his positive disposition, tremendously.

And he left something else as well.

After his death, I was given his lifetime collection of 35mm slides.  These weren't the slides he took for clients.  These were slides he took while on his own adventures, which he had squirreled away haphazardly in shoeboxes, never brought out for anyone to see, save a mere handful of shots that he had enlarged and hung around his home.  In all, there were over 10,000 transparencies, spanning almost forty years.  Greg had begun the research into making the move to digital photography, but never got the opportunity to actually make the transition.  So his entire body of work remained in the analog realm.

What a PORTION of the collection looked like before cataloging. 
Only a handful of boxes were labeled.

I knew something needed to be done with these.  they showed not only Greg's view of life in Colorado (and around the world), but also showed a unique window into other people's lives, and showed the heart of what it was like to live in Colorado in the 70's and 80's.

I spent several weeks sorting the slides chronologically, as that seemed to be the most useful sort.  I then stored them all in slide drawers I bought through EBay, to prevent having them get scratched, dirty, and unorganized, as they had been for so many years already.  It seemed like the next logical step would be to have them sent overseas to be scanned, so I tested a couple of different companies with two hundred slides each.  I felt uncomfortable sending (potentially) so many slides around the world, but local companies would be way out of reach financially.  While not expensive on a per-slide basis, the cost would definitely add up no matter who scanned them.  I bought a scanner and tried scanning them myself, but it was cripplingly time-consuming, using over a minute per slide.  With me not sure how to proceed, the slides sat for several years.

During cataloging

Durango and Silverton RR, circa 1976

During that time, I got the idea to start a Kickstarter campaign to help pay for the scanning, then turn the slides into an experimental film about Greg.  This idea rolled around in my head for quite a while, trying to figure out how best to structure the payouts for backers, particularly regarding whether they would receive stills, copies of the DVD, director's commentary, or a combination of all the above.  Trying to get all this organized in my head before starting the campaign caused me to not start the campaign.

But then recently, while in the middle of a completely separate glass slide restoration project, I happened across a forum post that mentioned a different method of scanning.








It involved these steps:

1. Get a slide projector and remove the lens.
2. Using a high-quality digital camera with a macro lens, point the camera down the throat of the projector and take a picture of each slide.

Colorado Plains, 1980

It was so obvious, I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of this previously!  It had some big advantages over using a flatbed, namely quality and speed, and it would be very predictable, since the projector takes care of positioning each slide in exactly the same way.

Off to the races.  I've been able to scan 9500 slides in less than ten days, and since my mother still had our family's slide projector, the only cost was the purchase of a slide stacker, to make the loading process faster.  I had started by loading the carousel trays, which was plenty fast for the shooting process itself, but loading them and unloading them took a great deal of time.  Even though the stacker only holds forty at a time, loading it is so fast that it really doesn't matter whether it holds forty or four hundred.

I'll show more examples in Part II, which I'll post once the film is put together.