Playing With The Piper

Scroll down a bit and you'll find a photo of a girl's face with a lilly, and another photo of a female singer with a flute player. This image is a combination of the two, made way back when, years before anybody even dreamed of home computers and Photoshop.

Spiratone, Accura, Lentar, and a few other brands of "slide duplicaters" were on the market. Some gave you same size images, others allowed a bit of cropping. They'd fit about any camera with interchangeable lens by choosing the correct T-mount adapter. Price for a fixed magnification unit was as little as about $12.95. (Of course factoring for inflation, more like $50 or $60 today.) For illumination I used an electronic flash aimed at the diffuser panel at the end of the unit. Varying the distance controlled the exposure. It was also handy for making a B&W negative of a color slide.

Sometimes I'd have a partial roll of slide film in the camera, and rather than waste it I'd play around with making double exposures and/or using strongly colored filters. In this photo I think that I just squeezed the two mounted slides together into the slide holder and shot a few bracketed frames. I have a few color variants so I guess I played with filters too, but I liked this one the best.