I began taking photos in the pre-digital age. That's just the way things were. I'm sure you can relate. I would guess that I have around 1000 photographs in various albums and/or just sitting in boxes in their original sleeves along with the negatives. (See pic below if you have no idea what a negative is)
I know that this sounds like a lot of photos and it does feel like it when I lift them all at once, but the one thing I remember thinking as I went through them is, "I can't believe I don't have more photos from my time there, or there, or there..." It's just so easy these days. Back when I was taking all these pictures I was spending money with every press of the button. And there was no preview screen. It was a hit-and-hope type of thing. Maybe that had something to do with my self perceived lack of pictures? My Cheapness?...Or Laziness? These days I can snap 13 pictures of the same and pick out the best one(s), do some cropping and then ditch the rest with the only cost being my time.
So I have begun the task of scanning all these photographs into digital form so I can burn them for safe keeping and have myself some fun organizing, cropping and posting them. I use our colour scanning machine to scan them in at 400-600dpi. This creates larger file sizes, but will allow me to enlarge any of them in the future without losing any quality that the original photo has. This won't, however, make a bad picture better. I have taken my fair share of bad pictures.
The scanner creates a PDF file of the scanned images. I usually build 50 pictures or so into one PDF file and then do the first round of cropping. Once they are cropped I extract the photos as individual TIF files. These can be quite large and they will be what I use in the future for any enlargements, specialty projects, etc. I take the same PDF file and extract all the photos as individual JPG files. These are much small than the TIF files and it is these ones that I will use for any uploading to my Flickr Photostream or to a site like Facebook. They are small enough that they won't take up too much of my allotted space or too much time during the upload.
Beyond self-organization and memory preservation that I'm interested in for selfish reasons, I am hoping that those I have shared in all of these wonderful, adventurous and wonky experiences in the past will enjoy the memories too. And maybe in turn they will add to these collections with their own photos from the past.
If you know keep checking back in here or to my Flickr Photostream. If you don't know me you still have access to said Photostream, maybe just not to as many pictures.
Beyond this project, I have even more pictures from my youth that document my growing up, my sister growing up and our family through the years that I would like to get to eventually. It's a very labour intensive project that would probably cost me an arm and a leg to have someone else do the scanning. As such, now is the time.
That's it.
~ MJS
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