Jim’s Slide Scanning Business Blog

Incoming orders to my business are fairly consistent, with growing sales each year. Any loss in orders which might be attributed to dropping prices elsewhere in the industry, are more than offset by the growing market and an increase in local, no-ship orders. Also, as my customer base grows, orders from repeat customers increase.

Doing this work part-time, from my home-office, my capacity is limited. Most of the time, orders comes in at a rate quite close to my ability to process them comfortably. It’s rare that I’m over-burdened with work. It’s also rare that I have a day with no orders to work on.

After shipping out an order to a repeat customer, a cosmetic surgeon in Massachusetts on Monday, I had a couple of enjoyable days, with no orders to work on, a smooth balance.

Today, 124 slides arrived from Richard in Los Osos, CA. His order consists entirely of Kodachrome film, shot in the mid 70’s, to be scanned at 4000 PPI.

I got an e-mail reply from a relatively new, Canada based, slide scanning service provider. I wrote to them last week suggesting we exchange links. Since I don’t serve the Canada market, I felt that exchanging links would help promote each others pages. They agreed the link exchange would be a good idea so I’ll soon be creating a page for 35MM slides & scanning related links at www.slidescanning123.com.

Yesterday, 498 scans shipped out to Sue in Greensboro, NC.

Today, 100 slides arrived from Betsy in Port Charlotte, FL.

Tomorrow, 409 scans will ship out to Gary in Santa Monica, CA.

Orders for slides to digital conversion continue to flow in. Large orders have dropped off a bit in March but the average size orders continue.

In past years, April has been a busy month with an increase in orders, possibly a result of Spring cleaning!

QuickBooks shows that sales are up over the same period last year, while my prices have not changed. That seems to indicate the film to digital market is continuing to grow.

A consistently good ranking ( for dozens of related terms ) on the big search engines helps my business. I’ve never had to pay search engines to list my scanning page, I understand it can be quite costly.

Casual readers, customers and competitors are encouraged to comment on my blogs. Comments can be added by clicking on the comments link below. Comments can be anonymous, but all comments will be moderated by me before going public.

To promote sales of my existing stock photography, I’ve begun uploading photos to www.DigitalRailroad.net. The method of promoting sales there is a two-fold approach. First, the uploaded images go into professional looking pages, organized by category. I can then promote sales of these images myself, by contacting by contacting related magazine publishers, etc.

The second way my stock photo sales are promoted is via the MarketPlace at Digital Railroad. A large pool of image buyers use the Digital Railroad Marketplace to acquire stock photography.

Most of my New England Stock Photos archive is set up as “rights managed” sales.

So, how many photos have I sold via DRR? As of 2/5/07, Zero! I’m not discouraged though. I just started uploading there in December and my collection there is small. I’m continually adding new work there as time allows.

There’s been an increase in recent orders for scanning of slides of artwork. It seems more and more artists are digitizing their artwork slides, for placement on Web sites, print making etc.

Today I shipped and order of artwork slide scans to Connecticut. While I’m sitting here working on another order of ~250 slides of art, sent from Illinois, I get get a call from Diane, an artist in Virginia, who was recommended to me by another artist. Diane is sending slides of quilts and wearable art.

The artists are coming out of the woodwork to convert slides of their art to digital image files.

Very often I get customers who have 35MM slides of artwork, usually paintings. I have found that artists are often the most difficult customers to satisfy, with scans of their artwork slides. One of the other scan service providers doesn’t guarantee scans of artwork.

The issues usually come from customers expecting the “scan” to look exactly like the art. There are several factors involved here. First, when artwork is captured on slide film, the lighting, film type and other factors impact how the slide looks, in comparison to the art.

Second, when a scan is made of that slide, the scan often does not look exactly like the slide. Third, it can be difficult get the right “white balance” on scans of artwork, especially if the art was made on paper or canvas that is not white. To get the best white balance there needs to be something white in the image.

One of my customers sent slides of art, drawn with charcoal. She called after reviewing the scans and claimed “the charcoal was pure black” yet the scans show the charcoal as slightly gray. To correct this I had to adjust the contrast on each of her scans.

Now, when customer call wanting to send slides of art, I tell them to expect the need for adjustments at their end, since I cannot make a scan look exactly like the art, when I have not seen the art!

Last week a potential customer dropped off ~2500 slides for scanning. The slides were distributed across about 30 Kodak carousel trays.

Most of the slide tray boxes had a strong smell of mold or mildew. Some of the slide tray boxes were so moldy, the cardboard had become soft and black mold was visible on the exterior of the boxes. The majority of the slides had mold or mildew visible on the actual slide. Some slides had stains which seemed to indicate there was water damage, in addition to the mold.

Due to the condition of the slides, I decided it was a project I did not want. I referred this customer to a few other local scan service providers.

If you are storing a collection of slides, make sure they are not in an extremely humid environment or in a place where they might get damaged by water.

I’ve published a note on my slide scanning page announcing that orders over 500 scans might not be possible to complete before Christmas, due to current demand for the service. Gift certificates are available by calling Jim at 781-244-5655.

After experiencing a big increase in scanning work over the last 2 months, I realized the type of orders coming my way are changing.

Instead of the average family slide collection, from anywhere across the country, I’m seeing a shift toward more local customers who want to deal locally, and avoid mailing.

I’m also seeing more large orders, over 1000 scans. More often lately I’m getting orders from professional photographers, who don’t want me to enhance their scans because they have PhotoShop skills.

In addition to my popular slide scanning services, I get lots of calls about the photos I’ve published on the Web. Yesterday I got a call from a woman in England looking to buy 2 prints of images she found on my Anna Maria Island page. Look for 3 of my photographs in the November 07 issue of Coastal Living Magazine, in the article about Nahant, Massachusetts. Last spring, New Hampshire magazine bought rights to several of my images for their article on the New Hampshire seacoast.