A quest down the rabbit hole of old, OLD photos reminded me of how much of the photos, film, video, and audio recordings I have from my youth are still in a very non-electronic and potentially fragile state. In looking for any of my baby pictures for example, scans of pictures I took in high school are the earlierst I have in any electronic format, and 17 years old is hardly a baby picture. That in turn led me to electronic copies of old 8mm home movies that I long ago digitized – from there I can grab a screenshot of 3 year old me at Halloween, but it’s not a very high resolution picture at all.
A lot of those original pictures from my parents are in storage and just need to be scanned. I also still have all of those 8mm films. I’m willing to bet that I can do a lot better job of digitizing them than I did 20+ years ago.
Yeah – in my copious free time…
Meanwhile, I also ran across some of the B&W film and color slides that I’ve digitized. For example:
The house where I lived during high school. My B&W negatives were stored properly and scan up real well.
Some of the color slides are still in pretty good shape, although there’s been a little color shifting. (Hey, look, in the driveway, it’s THE MAX!!)
Other slides have much better color retention, but weren’t stored in a clean environment, so they’re covered with spots of dust and schmutz.
Next time I’m bored maybe I’ll see how much a little Photoshop can clean up the dust spots. Or maybe a little bit of very gentle TLC applied to the original slides could clean them up without destroying them.
In my copious free time…
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 