Alright, my apologies for doubting your best intentions.
As to the question why no more slides for me - as I said, a matter of preference and lack of need.
Sorry for taking this thread further off-topic btw, but since OP's trip is already behind us and he's back with his images, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore.
When it comes to photography, there are two things that I (currently) find interesting: the image itself, and the physical print as a means to communicate it.
For the image as such, slide film would evidently be a perfectly fine way to record it, next to a number of also perfectly fine alternatives.
For the print, I enjoy wet printing more so than inkjet printing. Wet printing works best with negatives, so slides don't have much meaning in that context.
Yes, I could scan and then inkjet print. It would make shooting slides acceptable since there's also the possibility to print. In fact, for many years, I used to have digital prints on my walls made from scanned slides. This was in a period when I shot lots of slides - digital was already there, but the price/performance ratio was horrible for a suffering student like myself, and the technical quality of digital was, well, far from what it is today. So back then, it made sense to me to shoot slides, which I did for a couple of years, exclusively.
Mind you, I come from a slide-shooting family, so to speak. Between approx. 1970 and 1989 my father shot slides exclusively. My sister and her then-husband shot slides exclusively between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s. I shot slides exclusively in the first half of the aughties. Combined, we have thousands and thousands of slides neatly tucked away. Or as in the case of my own slides, partly neatly, partly chaotically - but tucked away nonetheless.
So I'm no stranger to slides, neither am I to the joys of projecting them. Concerning those joys - I can sort of see myself sitting in a comfy chair in a darkened room, listening to the click-clack sound of the projector's transport and maybe some good music playing in the background, a nice drink in my hand...then again, I'm not that kind of guy - I don't have the patience to sit on my a$$ watching a static image on a projection screen. Not to mention having to dig up the damn thing from storage, set it up, suffer the bad temperament of that nice click-clack mechanism, deal with the unwieldy reflection screen and the life forms that probably call it home by now, and digging through endless boxes with trays full of slides. More power to those who truly enjoy this, let alone on a regular basis, but frankly, I just can't be bothered.
The most 'recent' slide show I did actually featured the series I took that example from earlier in this thread. Some close family members politely sat through the whole thing, seemed to mildly enjoy being taken back to the days of old (at least for a brief moment). And mostly the chattered about the places some of them recognized, enquired about the weather we had during our trip, how the AirB'n'B was, if we had eaten in that particular restaurant around the corner, how was our flight home again, isn't parking at the airport ridiculously expensive nowadays...etc. etc. I realized that a slide show is sort of nice, but if I'm brutally honest, it's a whole lot more practical, flexible and every bit as nice as handing aunt E a stack of prints, sit next to her and let her go through them at her own pace. So I resolved back then on that night in 20...16? that I wouldn't bother my family with any more slide shows.
Besides, that particular series was shot on Velvia 100, which I bought 'mildly expired' (no, really, it was maybe 1 year out of date) but with a visible magenta cast. Slide film prices were already on the rise back then, even though not quite as outrageously priced as today, and I lucked out on this fridge sale at a local camera store. I really did, in a way, because that color cast really is/was quite mild. So much for the 'fridge sale' thing btw, since slide film often doesn't age all that well; I've had Agfa RSX...something slow (50?) look just great, but I've also had other types of film look really...not so nice. And there's plenty of examples here on this forum of people asking "hey how come this slide film expired in 1867 only gives a faint magenta image; I read online that it should do just fine processed in the C41 developer I just bathed 28 expired rolls of Vericolor II and the neighbor's cat in - only 3 months ago". No, thanks.
Anyway, processing, since we're at it, was another story - since there were probably 8 people in the country shooting slide film with any regularity back then, processing lines weren't really what they had once been in the bustling 1990s. So when I got my slides back, some 3 or 4 weeks after handing them in at the lab, two or so of the rolls had cyan streaks of gunk running along the full length of the film. If you're wondering - these were developed at the FUJIFILM-run lab that processes the bulk of the color film shot around here (probably even today).
So I realized back then that shooting slide film requires either careful home processing, or a lively scene of slide film shooters that can keep a lab on its feet with sufficient throughput to maintain a stable and high quality level. Which just isn't the case anymore, today, so it would have to be home processing. And as you well know, home processing E6 is a bit of a different story than doing C41 or ECN2, where you actually have considerable leeway (even when wet printing) in mildly messing things up. Sure, within margins, but those margins are lax compared to the tightrope walking act required by E6.
Anyway, as I said before, I'm interested in the photograph itself - although I don't really consider myself to be particularly talented in this area, so much of my energies are spent (wasted?) on technical stuff. Fortunately, there's always printing, which is a very technical activity. And that happens to not really require slides, although a decent scan will also make a nice inkjet out of any decent slide. Scanning. I scanned pretty religiously for a while, but this was back in that period when 'digital photography' for me meant shooting slides and then scanning them. And then...well, they were digital files. I still have those files and they come in handy once in a blue moon for a technical illustration. Otherwise, they just sit there, waiting for inevitable data corruption or los. Oh yes, I could still shoot slides and suffer through the process of scanning film. I do this once in a while - but I try to minimize it, as the act of scanning, to me, is at about the same entertainment level as, say, cleaning the upstairs toilet. It's firmly beaten by ironing our clothes. That's an exhilarating, rewarding task by comparison. So much for scanning. It's a necessary evil, and it so happens that it's usually not very necessary, which cuts down the net evil factor. Good.
Back to this realization that slides don't help me in producing better prints. If I want to make a really good inkjet print, I start with a digital file (which, coincidentally, frees up time for ironing or scrubbing toilets.) If I want to make a print that I enjoy making, I need a negative, color or black and white, so if I'm stuck with slides at that stage, I actually have a non-starter. Not good. Projection? Well, it may be 'the best way to enjoy film', but the problem is that 'best' is kind of subjective, 'best' doesn't really help any if it's not being done, and 'enjoying film' for me happens either at the image-making stage (and my nose doesn't give a hoot whether it's pressed against a film back or a greasy LCD) or the printmaking stage. In fact, come to think about it, there's nothing in particular I 'enjoy' about film. I never tried eating it (there's some kind of jello involved, so maybe...?), so I guess I may just be missing out. But really, film is just an information carrier, and in the same way I don't 'enjoy a solid state harddrive', I don't enjoy film as such.
Where does this leave me? With the conclusion that shooting slides would cost me a lot of money, but it would not help me make better photographs, nor better prints. There's simply nothing to justify the (frankly, insane) prices of slide film today. What would I get in return for the premium I'd pay for slide film? Bragging rights? I've got an 8x10 for that. Heck, I've got two! If that doesn't give me trumps in a micturating competition, I might as well not join in. Which is actually exactly what I try to do anyway.
So the slides I've already got remain right where I last left them. The other day, I actually
needed some slides to test a scanner for someone else and I had to go out to the shed, dig through a large pile of packing boxes to actually locate some slides. They happened to be from a bicycle ride I did with my parents (who were still in a responsible biking age back then) some two decades ago. The slides looked every bit as nice as the day I got them back from the lab - contrasty, with nicely saturated, realistic (well, sort of) colors. The photos themselves were ho-hum. Sentimental as I am, I don't have the heart to discard them. But in all honesty, it's no huge loss that they're never projected, and that they also happened to date from just before the time I got a decent film scanner and consequently, I have no digital scans of them.
It's 2023, and some things are just gone forever. "House parties", as we called them, are firmly stuck back in the early 1990s, anti-nuke protests live on forever in our memories of the 1980s, our first disillusionment with the phenomenon of 'the internet' was in the early 2000s and the 1970s and 1960s also harbored lots of cozy things that despite all their niceties, are convicted to remain stuck in those past decades. And for me, slide film lives in those same realms of years gone by.
So there's your answer. I think the original answer 'I have no use for them' covered it quite aptly, but in case you were wondering, here's the background to it.
PS: no, I'm not in the minority because I don't scan much of my film. The vast majority of people who dedicate a lot of time to photography don't scan film. They don't come anywhere near film. After all, why should they?
PPS: in case of any misunderstanding:
