05.making slides

At my slide talks, I am praised for my slides. A lot of work and time is spent to get it right. And darkness during projection is essential.
If the source is from the web, the image is saved in 'my pictures'.
Opening 'fine pix', I can trim unwanted edges and sharpen the image.
Opening 'Serif portrait plus' [from Ruth], I can change contrast & brightness, rotate - if the image is not quite straight, and adjust canvas size to create white margins, to give the 3:2 proportion for the print and its slide.
It the image is less than 40 or 50 KB, it will be rejected at Boots or Tesco. I can print it on our HP printer - often it is still of adequate quality.
From books I also occasionally have to print on the HP printer first: Either to enlarge small images for easier photography, or to avoid difficult access of the camera in a book, or to avoid seams across pictures on 2 pages. I print twice and do plastic surgery. The seam must be lengthwise - to avoid light penetration.
I find 'normal' print speed adequate, and I can still change contrast and colour intensity.
I also retouch many pictures, both photo prints and HP prints, to emphasize lines, to add colour or correct blank areas etc.
Slide film is becoming less common - but I do not plan to invest in PowerPoint equipment and to convert my 3,000 plus slides.
For photography, I wait for a time with steady ambient light - cloudy or sunny. The SLR camera has 3 extra 'plus' lenses attachable, to attain images from 3 cm to 80 cm. The camera is fixed to an old overhead projector column movable vertically and it is also tiltable, all on a wheeled frame that can be moved nearer or further from the glass pane for adjusting the lighting. Exposure also has to reckon with varying darknesses of parts of the image.
Rarely, I can tilt the image relative to the horizontal, to compensate for parallax in the image.
When all is worked out then, for maximum sharpness, the aperture is set to minimum and the shutter time is increased to compensate. For exposures of more than 1 second, this is timed on my watch.
There was a time when I bordered the image for photography with black plastic strips to fill the whole slide area. But this was fiddly, and often needed further blackening of the area on the film. So now I stick pieces of 'post-it' over void areas, and blacken them with an indelible felt pen just before mounting.
To avoid mis-cutting the film between slides by the laboratory, I order films to be returned uncut. I use Gepe plastic mounts and write on each frame the identity of the image & artist, including their dates, painting method, size, current location and source. A black dot in the lower left corner ensures correct orientation in the carousel: for each slide there are 7 wrong possibilities of placement - sideways, upside down and back to front...
The slides are stored by topics in hanging files of 24. But some slides are used in more than one talk, so I hope to create a database at some free time.