Old Pictures

Before digital cameras, I loved taking pictures as much as I do now. I even took photography classes and developed b&w photos and some color slides. For my own pictures, and family pictures, I have had to work out storage and digitizing solutions. I have digitized a lot, but it is an ongoing process.

In particular, I have a lot of slides. Most of them are from my trips to Spain, Labrador and Denmark, but there are also some from little trips and around home. For a long time, I didn't know what I would do about a reasonable quality and cheap way to transfer them to digital. Also, I wanted it to be fast. An old scanner I had would do slides, 4 at a time, painfully slowly and not get a very satisfactory image either! I also needed to do something fast in the sense that my slides were not storing very well, even in their special slide boxes and were no longer pristine, to say the least.

But, last summer, I came up with an idea when I got a new camera, the Canon PowerShot SX10IS. I set it up on my tripod in the dining room behind the slide projector and projected the slides onto one of my bright white window shades. And, for several exhausting late nights, I took pictures of each of the projected slide images, one after another, while it was good and dark outside.

I have uploaded a lot of the images to Facebook. You can see the albums even if you are not a Facebook user. (But 'friend me' if you are! There is a link in the sidebar over there--->)

First, I uploaded all my Labrador (Canada, not dogs!) slides to Facebook as I knew the most people would be interested in them, from the villages where I took the pictures. This picture shows the fog starting to roll in between the outer islands in Nain.

Labrador
Album 1
Album 2
Album 3

Then, I posted just a sampling of my cross country trip pictures in one album, like this one of Crater Lake.

Finally, in the last view days, I cropped out the 'screen' from around all the Spain images and uploaded them. This is one of my most favorite pictures that I ever took. It was in La Alberca. I like so much about it, like the boy in the background, skipping to the fountain.

Spain (and some of Portugal too)
Album 1
Album 2
Album 3
Album 4

Also, over a year after digitizing them, I've uploaded my Denmark images. They were taken in Copenhagen, Roskilde and Lejre. Here is the goose patrol at the Lejre Center.

Lejre Seminar/Copenhagen
Album 1
Album 2

All the pictures are terribly out of order and I haven't taken the time to label them, but at least they are digitized and shared with people who were there and may even be in the pictures. Perhaps they will even be found by the people I lost touch with!

I won't bother to upload all the around home ones, but perhaps I will occasionally post a 'vintage' one here. Here's an old one of me on my horse, Charlie.

And trail riding on the farm.

Digitizing all the old photos is quite a trip down memory lane! (The actual lane/old road in the above picture is called Lover's Lane.)

I have often wondered over the past few years if I would have preferred prints to slides in the long run, not that I could do anything about it. While prints tend to be easier to digitize, once I determined a way to digitize my slides, I was happy I'd used slide film. You know how the light in slides combined with sitting in a darkened room you can't see the details of, can kind of transport you into the image? I think some of the luminosity of a slide comes across even in the pictures of the slides.

And speaking of 'memory lane'. It is so strange to remember how second nature it was to try to anticipate a shot, line up a shot, focus manually, adjust settings and take a picture with a plain old SLR camera. It was so hard to point and shoot really fast to catch something fleeting. I remember the rush of trying to get a shot of someone moving and wanting them just so. I remember missing so many shots. But then, the *thrill* of realizing (often weeks later when the film was developed!) that I'd gotten a shot I really wanted or one that came out better than I'd thought it had. Because of the concentration photography with limited film took, I really remember a lot about the moments in time I took the pictures, unlike a lot of my current digital snaps. There are a lot of examples of this in my Spain images. For example, the girl moving through this image. I remember willing her not to move out of the frame of the stairwell before I could get the shot. I remember actually woefully thinking I'd pretty much missed it at the time!

Or, this shot of a bull getting a little payback time. It happened in a blink!

My photos also remind me of who I was at various stages of my life and the sorts of things that fascinated me. A lot of these things are still in my nature, but it's still entertaining to look back sometimes.