Digitizing Memories One Slide At A Time

When we moved a couple years ago, I tossed a lot of old photos, negatives, film, and even cameras. I just didn’t want to deal with them anymore. But I did keep about 20 boxes of slides. Half of them were ones I had taken over the years. The other half were ones I inherited from my folks, mostly taken by my dad.

My plan was to scan them all in (digitize them) now that I was retired and had time. Once they are on the computer, you have them forever. Or at least until storage technology changes again.

So, during the worst of this year’s winter hibernation, I finally got tired of looking at the boxes and decided to begin the arduous task. The equipment I had for this was a bizarre Hewlett-Packard scanner that included a slide scanning attachment. I had used it before but remembered that it was tedious and slow. I once even offered to pay my kids a quarter apiece to scan them. I thought they would jump at the chance to make easy money, but they sensed that if I wasn’t willing to do it, it must be difficult. So they declined.

It didn’t take long to find out that the scanner would not work with my new computer. So I looked on Amazon for another option and, sure enough, there was a device that could accept a stack of slides to preview and scan, one at a time, to a storage card that could later be read by my computer. It was cheaply built and jammed often but it worked much faster than my old scanner and even allowed me to rotate and reverse the image if I put the slide in wrong. It also can scan negatives, so now I wish I hadn’t tossed them.

Going through my folks’ slides was a sentimental journey through my childhood. As I understand it, my dad bought an Argus 35mm rangefinder camera about the time I was born, so there were a lot of photos of me and my siblings from that point on. I remember him licking the bottom of a flash bulb before inserting it into the flash unit so there would be a good contact. There was no automatic exposure. You guessed and learned from experience what shutter speed and F-stop to use. I certainly give my dad credit for all the slides he took that documented our lives as we grew up. And I’m very glad he organized them so I didn’t have to.

Photography was expensive back then. You needed film, of course, and flash bulbs for inside shots. Slides were the cheapest way to take photos. Prints were and still are expensive. With today’s digital cameras you can take thousands of pictures for basically no cost as long as you don’t print them.

I have about 1,000 of my own slides and figure it will be easier to just scan them in and then organize them on my computer. I will adjust the colors and contrast as well since many of the slides have faded. The scanned slides will never fade.

With slides, it’s all about the show. I remember having to watch a slide show almost everywhere we went. Dad would bring his Kodak projector, screen, and an extra bulb. A wall or white sheet was sometimes used instead of the screen. The projector had a slide stacker, which was a big step up from the older “slide-at-a-time” ones. But it was pre-carousel days. It’s slide stacker could hold only 36 slides, so just as you are nodding off, we all got blasted by bright light as he loaded more. He always cut off one corner of each slide so he could more easily orient them. It was probably a trick he learned in Popular Mechanics.

We watched slides of my folks’ trip to Norway so many times that the sight of another fjord was enough to make me almost despise my heritage country. But back in the 1960s and 1970s my relatives, the usual captive audience, seemed to enjoy watching the slides. At least they were always polite. And my dad was a teacher, so he was in his element. But I always wondered what they really thought since many of them farmed so could never get away, especially in the summer, as my folks could.

We also watched a lot of slides of previous get-togethers like family reunions and Christmas. I enjoyed those since I could relate to them. You could see how people you knew looked when they were younger, especially kids who change a lot over a short time.

But the days of slides are over. No one stops over to show you their slides. The technology is certainly available to have a photo show. You can bring a tablet computer or your smart phone to show some photos. You can also display those photos on a TV from those devices or a USB drive if they are set up for it. You would not bring your dad’s old projector or even a digital projector.

Scanning slides allows me to memorialize my past. Once scanned in and organized, I upload them to an internet service and tell friends and relatives how to access them. That way they can view and copy them at their leisure.

U-oh. I just remembered that we have 34 books of photos Catherine painstakingly created over many years. They will need to be scanned in, too, and that will be even more work. Maybe next winter.