Photos from 45th Surgical Hospital in Vietnam

[DiGilio]

Fort Meade

[DiGilio]

Heres an picture and caption about when their hospital was mortared. And a postcard from when he visited Washington DC while at Fort Meade before Vietnam. He was actually drafted in 1964.

[DiGilio]

Well Santa brought a new HP scanner to my house for Christmas. It scans a whole lot better than the old one. Im going to try and scan all the photos now. My only question is what is Resolution (DPI)? When I go to scan a picture I can pick 200, 300, 600, 1200 or 2400 (my computer cant do the 2400 though). What is the best to scan the pictures with? It seems the higher numbers are better but I just want to make sure before I start scanning.

 

I really know nothing about publishing and all but I would like to put the scanned pictures on the internet somehow when Im done so all of you can see them.

[Bob Hudson]

Well Santa brought a new HP scanner to my house for Christmas. It scans a whole lot better than the old one. Im going to try and scan all the photos now. My only question is what is Resolution (DPI)? When I go to scan a picture I can pick 200, 300, 600, 1200 or 2400 (my computer cant do the 2400 though). What is the best to scan the pictures with? It seems the higher numbers are better but I just want to make sure before I start scanning.

 

I really know nothing about publishing and all but I would like to put the scanned pictures on the internet somehow when Im done so all of you can see them.

 

 

Scanning resolution (DPI) is dependent upon the size of your original image and the desired size of your final image.

 

If you want to scan something at high resolution to make a nice 8x10 inch print, then you want to the image to be able to print 8x10 it at about 150DPI (if you were going to use it in, say, a printed book, you'd want it to be 300DPI). If you want to make digital archival files of original slides and prints, then you want high resolution scans.

 

Okay so we want our final image to be 8x10 at 300DPI, so if our original is a 4x5 photo, then we need to scan it at 300DPI. If our original was about 3x4 inches, we'd want to scan at 400DPI. If you scan a 35mm slide, then you might start using the 1200 DPI setting. The basic rule: the smaller the original image, the higher the scanning resolution. I typically use between 300 and 600 DPI for scanning smaller photos: the higher resolution lets me crop out a portion of the image of the image and enlarge it.

 

Now if all you want to do is to scan a photo and use it on the web, you can scan at 200 DPI or less: computer screens typically display at 72DPI so I typically scan at 150-200 DPI for something that's going online and won't need to be cropped.

 

I'd suggest taking one image and trying it several different ways to get a feel for what your scanner can do.

[DiGilio]

Would anybody be interested in seeing all the pictures once Im done? Im about halfway through scanning them all and the quality of the scans is much better than the ones I posted before. Heres a quick compairson (without photoshop since I dont know how to do that yet).

Old


New

[Mr-X]

You could start a thread in the EPHEMERA & PHOTOGRAPHS section.

 

I would be happy to pin it.

 

I for one would be happy to have a look at them all.

[BEAST]

You can put me down as a big "ME TOO!" I would like to see all of the photos!

[DiGilio]

Sounds good. Im scanning them at 1200 DPI and sometimes 2400 DPI for important or small photos. I get the clearest and best scans that way but it could often take a minute or two to scan a single photo. Im a little less than 3/4 through them now but I should be done in a few days at the most.

 

How should I do a thread once Im done? Should I do it like I did here: put them on photobucket and then put them here with the [ IMG] tags?

[VALERY]

Thank you to share this outstanding pictures lot!

Valery

[Mr-X]

Sounds good. Im scanning them at 1200 DPI and sometimes 2400 DPI for important or small photos. I get the clearest and best scans that way but it could often take a minute or two to scan a single photo. Im a little less than 3/4 through them now but I should be done in a few days at the most.

 

How should I do a thread once Im done? Should I do it like I did here: put them on photobucket and then put them here with the [ IMG] tags?

 

 

I think that would be the best way. I have over 2000 images in my photobucket account so I don't think it will be a problem storage wise.

If you are close to your photobucket storage limit you might need to start a second account.

[DiGilio]

I just finished scanning all the Vietnam, USS Geiger and about half of the pre-Vietnam ones.

 

I started to load some onto photobucket but the whole website has been very very slow for me lately and sometimes freezes up. I started another photobucket account since I did have 1500+ pictures on my main one but its been the same thing. I dont see why it should do that so I hope it will just fix itself.

[DiGilio]

I have one more question about storing the photos. Right now I have them in a box in stacks. Im going to go down to the craft store tomorrow to see if I can get acid-free paper to put in between each photo so they wont stick. But Ive had a problem with old photo curling up a little before (they werent stored the greatest though). I read its from different parts of the photo drying out at different rates. I really do not want that to happen to these. Whats the best way to try and prevent this as much as possible? Also if a photo gets slightly curled is there any way to straigten it out again?

 

Edit: by the way all these photos are scanned and in a thread pinned in this section.