Tag: Digital

Another Frigid Afternoon

With temperatures predicted to dip way below zero (15 to 25 degrees below) over the weekend we decided it might be a good time to find a project to work on inside our warm house.  

The one that came to mind was…photos! The ever-looming photos, a project we kept saying we’ll work on when we retire – even after we were retired.

But, at last, the timing felt right. 

Our photo work area.

Since 1982 (when our first son was born) I dutifully put photos in albums in chronological order. I have several mismatched albums of all different sizes, one for each year, through the kids high school years. Then digital cameras became the norm and now photos are stored on the computer. 

Piles of photos on the floor.

But still we had a few photos printed, plus my mom had duplicates of our sons that she gave back to us, and Gary’s sister gave us back all the photos we gave her of the kids when they were growing up, and there were stray photos for various reasons in different areas of the house and some old, framed photos to take out of the frame, some very old black and white photos that date way back etc., etc., etc.  We had a lot of organizing to do. 

So we set up our six-foot folding table in a downstairs room, unfolded two folding chairs, found archival pens, extra envelopes, a scissors, notepad and pen, and started in. We brought everything to the central work station. working diligently for several hours the first day. We stopped for lunch and a quick walk in the subzero temperatures, and then back at it. (Won’t the kids be glad someday!)

Our mismatched photo albums in chronological order.

The next day we started in again and did get the organizing done, cleaned off the shelf area in the closet where the albums are kept, and put the albums back in place. 

Our next step is to go through each album and weed out the unwanted/not-so-good pictures…and who knows, maybe even combine a few albums together?

More photos.

The next steps may be more enjoyable. However, there are still many hours left on this project…but the weather forecast is for continued cold temperatures for a few more days, so that will be a helpful motivator.

And then there are the slides………

Slides

It took a little digging to get beyond the definition of “slide” as a movement or slippery surface in the app Dictionary.com. What I was looking for was the definition of a photograph slide. I came upon this: “a small glass plate for mounting specimens to be examined under a microscope.”

A single slide.

That must be where the name for the pictures we took with a 35mm camera came from. The development process produced small square cardboard frames encapsulating a negative. When you shine a light through the negative an image projects onto a screen. 

Getting set up for a slideshow.

There were a few years in the 80’s when we took slides (we also have a few slides from my childhood when my parents also took slides.)

Then there were many years we simply took photographs and had them printed out. I dutifully put them in to photo albums (chronologically).

A few of my photo albums on the closet shelf.

For several years now we’ve taken digital photos, and our pictures are on our phones or “in the cloud”… How does one keep them all in order?

Looking at our photo albums is the most fun…it’s easy; holding the photos albums and turning the pages is enjoyable and…it doesn’t require any set up. But every so often we decide to look at our slides, as we did the other night.

Our Kodak Carousel Projector.

We set up the old screen which is still in very good condition, we got out the vintage slide projector (the light bulb still worked – yay) and brought up our many carousal slide trays and other miscellaneous boxes of slides.

Our boxes of slide trays for the projector.

We did have fun looking at old pictures. Plus, we took our time so we could do some organizing and purging. This is not a one evening process. It is time consuming.

My attempt at organizing the slides we viewed.

Soon we will tuck everything away again, until the next time we decide to take a trip down memory lane by viewing our slides. Hopefully the slideshow will be even better with only the best slides to be viewed.