Like a lot of people, I took a lot of pictures on my trips to sea. Most of them were in 35mm slide format. They give great quality, but are not the most convenient things to browse through.
I have been having a nostalgia run of late though. I finally figured out a way to get decent results converting my old seagoing slides to digital format. (I had bought a scanner a year ago, but it turned out garbage.) Now I have a $10 plastic garage light with a milk white globe that I turned upside down on a board. I put a 25 watt bulb into it and made a small frame to hold a slide against it. I put my 5 meg camera on a tripod, set it for super close-up and manual focus. About twenty seconds of fiddling later I click the shutter. I am getting better at it and am down to doing re-takes on only two out of five.
This project gives me an excuse to look at a lot of ´ship stuff´. When I get a few of them together into a folder that might interest this group, I will post it here.

Cool - as a professional photographer - your method sounds intriguing (can you take a photo of the apparatus?)

also - if you have any good photos to share, I´m sure we´d love to see them in the gallery - let me know and I can create an album for you.

An additional note, I use a halogen bulb in the fixture to get better white balance. It gives the light of a regular 60 watt bulb. It is the type that looks like it started as a tube bulb and then the middle swelled up.
KP Bosun

here is an example of one that I did with the rig. This one has not been re-touched.
We were carrying a herd of cattle from Saint John, N.B. to Brazil. They did quite well. Two or three ´freshened´ so we had fresh milk and calves to deal with too. Yes, we did have a ´cowboy´ signed on for that trip.

I finally got a couple of minutes to crop and do a quick edit on the cows. It looks good on the monitor, hope that it is the same here.
KPBosun

I found that I was getting too cool a color balance with the original set-up. I first increased the wattage to 100 and used that for a while. The plastic globe still seemed to be giving a bit of a color cast however. I bit the bullet and went to a large local hardware store and bought a glass, frosted, tapered shade for some sort of old fashioned light fixture. It cost $7.00 US (plus tax of course). This combination works considerably better and saves me time with the Elements 3  software. I also added a wooden shroud around the slide holder to cut the glare.

Here is the new shade

and the glare shroud
I hope some of you have been able to use some of this stuff