Author: admin

This is an 1/8-scale model of a revolutionary, step-and-repeat camera, that was built in Kansas City and sold all over the world- beginning in the United States and Canada, then England, Germany, Australia and Japan.

The company was owned by the Wally family who also owned the Western Blueprint Company in Kansas City. Jack Wally had worked as a photo-journalist for some years, and went to work for his father at Western Blue. While there, he started designing and selling his own reprographic cameras.

He eventually hit on the idea of a step-and-repeat camera for book and label printers. With his sons, he started a new manufacturing company in North KC called Opti-Copy. The company had a two major product lines, Litho– for the Graphic Arts market and Repro– for blueprints and engineering.

The Graphic Arts camera was named the Imposer. They called it that because, in book printing, pages on a large flat were printed in position so that the finished, printed sheet could be folded into a signature, and then trimmed and bound into a book. In the industry, the layout for correct placement of pages on a press sheet was called the imposition.

My dad, Ron Halsey, had been supervisor of the camera department at Kingsport Press in East Tennessee when they bought Opti’s first Imposer, S/N #001. (Kingsport had been, at one time, the largest book manufacturer in the world.) It wasn’t long till he went to work for them. Dad was the 6th person hired by Opti-Copy and in 1979, I became the 16th.

The systems were assembled in North KC and later at a new plant in Lenexa, KS. Opti was often visited by printers, film manufacturers and lens companies from all over the world. It seemed like someone visited every week to test a new film or light system. Opti was state-of-the-art, and enjoyed playing host to these companies as the collaborations were mutually beneficial. Once, forty of the largest publishers in Japan flew to Kansas City as a group to witness a demonstration.

The Opti-Copy Imposer could project pages or labels onto film flats, faster and more accurately than had ever been done, before. An 8- or 16-page flat could be produced in a couple of minutes. Press sheets of 100 labels could be set up and then run, automatically. The same jobs, when done by hand, were subject to human error and took much more time to accomplish.

After selling over 2,000 of the systems, in 1988, the Wally family sold the business to the Polychome Corp. and my Dad and I left the company. He wanted to start his own business, so with a partner, they founded ISI in Greensboro, NC. By that time, an Imposer system with all the “extras” cost around $250,000. Imaging Specialists bought, upgraded and operated 4 of these systems. We bought them, used (and for much less than a quarter of a million each!) By 1994 our family had bought out the partner.

We can now do, with modern systems and software, what would have once taken hours (or might even have been impossible) in the darkroom. But we continue to benefit from our experience and even some of our old Opti equipment.

A few years ago we traded Kingsport Press for the old Imposer #001. We are using its sliding copyboard (like the one on the model) in our photographic negative digitizing project.

April 30, 1975- US Marines helped provide security for the evacuation of the last Americans in Vietnam and thousands of “at risk” Vietnamese during the Fall of Saigon. Operation Frequent Wind was a massive assembly of aircraft and ships that became the largest helicopter evacuation in history.
These photos were made by Master Gunnery Sergeant John Irwin, USMC (RET) when he served aboard the USNS Sgt. Truman Kimbro (T-AK-254).

The images are part of a collection of photos he has donated to the Alleghany Historical Museum.

The barge, in the photos, was an “ocean-going barge with a large group of people. Another ship had removed over a thousand from this barge and, when they could take no more, it was towed to us. When she came into sight, we could not believe the number of people still aboard.” After unloading, the barge was sunk by naval gunfire from a destroyer.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Imaging Specialists recently helped John publish his memoir, The Life Experience of MGySgt. John Ulus Irwin, Jr., USMC (Ret.) In the book, he recalls stories of his years of service in the United States Marine Corps. From the rescue of the Vietnamese refugees at the fall of Saigon, to becoming a Drill Instructor at Parris Island, posts on the Korean DMZ and in the Chilean Andes, then consulting with Kenyan Wildlife Service Rangers in Nairobi, John talks about the interesting people, exotic locations and unforgettable experiences he encountered during and after his career in the military.

On April 29th, the evacuation began in earnest. We sailed into the area where the evacuation ships were waiting, protected by destroyers. A Landing Ship Tank (LST) causeway was towed to us and lashed to our side as a loading platform. As the refugees were flown aboard the naval ships with landing platforms, they would be placed onboard boats for transfer to their evacuation ship.

The helicopters doing the evacuations would overfly the Kimbro in route and returning with their escorting Cobra gunships. They would overfly us on the way back and as the Cobra gunships passed you could see the evidence of expended ordinance. Now it was getting real.

Yun M. Kimbro, named for the ship (the M. was for Marines) was the first of 5 babies born while the ship was en route to Guam.

…a sentry was confronted by a man and a very pregnant woman. She was in labor! Our corpsmen quickly moved her to our berthing area and prepared for the birth of the first of five babies. Only one of the corpsmen had ever attended a birth but never assisted, so their anxiety level went up. With the baby on the way, I and another Marine held up a piece of tarp to separate her, the husband and two other children from the crowd. Yun M. Kimbro came into the world and you would have thought that we Marines were all the father!

The softcover, 6” x 9” book is 214 pages, with a black & white interior and it includes photos from John’s personal collection as well as from military sources.
Parents are cautioned- contains material that may be inappropriate for teens and younger.

The book is available for $16 from the Alleghany Historical Museum and Imaging Specialists, Inc., in Sparta, and online, at shop.starroute.net.

High resolution scans of a continuous tone print- or even better- a continuous tone negative are the best when making a reproduction.

In order to print photographs on an offset printing press, it is necessary to “screen” images or reduce them to evenly spaced rows of various sized dots. The resulting image is called a halftone.

In our business, we often have to copy halftone or screened images. We’ve been working on some new processes to remove halftone screens and patterns from those images. Sometimes, a printed photo is all we have- the original has been lost, destroyed or, for whatever reason, we just don’t have access to it.

Unfortunately, when we try to reproduce a halftoned image, the new image generated by a printer or a monitor usually shows an undesirable, Moiré pattern. The pattern comes from the array of dots or pixels in the reproduction fighting with the scanned dot pattern in the original image- whether it is depicted on a monitor or on a printed sheet.

For years, when we wanted to reproduce a screened image, we would simply set the camera a little out-of-focus, so the individual dots wouldn’t be a problem. And in the digital age, we would use a “Gaussian blur” to achieve the same result.

But, we always lost details. The halftone process lost details that were present in the original image, and then, blurring a halftone for reproduction would cause a loss of even more detail.

Now, however, we have some powerful, new tools to remove these regular, mechanical patterns from a printed photo. And we can hold onto more detail than we’ve ever been able to, before.

Here are some of our first test images looped with the initial results.

In 2018, Imaging Specialists worked with the library to develop a printed companion to their Veterans History Project, an online archive of veterans with ties to Ashe County, NC.
We designed the cover and pages using photos and text from their growing libguide database.
This year’s cover design incorporates an image from a World War I era War Bonds poster painted by Howard Chandler Christy in 1917.