STEPPING UP TO THE [SLIDE] PROJECT

I might have titled this post "Finding New/Old Photo Gems."

I know – I said I wouldn’t start anything new until I had completed some unfinished work, but this “new” project has been on my “to do” list for twenty years, and now is the time to make a start. We have at least two lifetimes of slides in storage. Amongst them are the slides my dad took of family events – probably 20 years of them – and these images will be meaningful to my whole extended family – and we have the slides that Mike took to mark the progress of our children from babyhood to adult. This is one huge, unfinished project that needs to be addressed, and I am stepping up to it.

 

I told the associate at Staples that I was looking for a slide scanner. I specified that I didn’t want a complicated system but at the same time I would hope for some quality. First he showed me an Epson combination slide and paper scanner. My eyes must have glazed over because he looked at me thoughtfully and led me to another model. “I’ve had my eye on this one,” he said, showing me a compact “ION” that scans only slides, “and have considered buying it for myself because it just looks easy. I’ve sold a number of them and no one has come back to say whether or not they like it.” He added that the scanning seemed simple, but he wasn’t sure about the quality. 

I could have left it there, read more reviews, talked to Mike, etc., but I’ve been doing all of that for years. So – without further discussion, hemming and hawing, I said I’d take it.

Anything that feels like it’s me alone with my computer is apt to put me over the edge, and indeed I was on the cusp. Suddenly I got cold feet. “What if I don’t like it,” I asked. “Take it home and try it,” insisted the associate. “If you don’t like it, bring it back. You have 14 days.”

So, I brought it home, read the simple instructions, installed the software, attached the scanner to my laptop, retrieved the copy paper box marked “Dobson Slides” from the garage, and set to work. It’s easy to set up the little scanner and so I can work frequently for short periods of time. 

You know, we took pictures on slide film for years, and even though I spoke fervently to both my dad and Mike about the uselessness of the slide medium, my complaints fell on deaf ears. They saw slides as a relatively inexpensive way to record family events, but this system allowed for only infrequent viewing of our pictures. We seldom had slides developed into photos. And the medium also influenced the type of pictures we took – very few candid snapshots.

My dad had an Airequipt projector. Each slide was slipped into a metal frame and then loaded into a magazine. I learned to do that in order to expedite the possibility of viewing the slides, but it wasn’t easy. The slides had to be loaded upside down and backwards, or some such thing, or else the image on the screen would be upside down – or backwards – or both. And being obsessive in my work, I demanded absolute chronology. I remember once that Mother and I had just about finished loading the magazines when Daddy tossed down a handful more, which threw off my system. At the time, it was very upsetting. Eventually the projector broke, and since it was obsolete, that was that. The slides were stored.

Mike, on the other hand, had a Kodak projector using carousels, and that was a simpler process but still imperfect. We found it desirable for storage purposes to have carousels that held a large number of slides, but we discovered that those didn’t operate smoothly through the projector. Frustrating! We were always watching for a deal on carousels, and if we were out of carousels, we waited for a sale. I think it was about 1990 when Mike found someone who was discarding many carousels, and for a minimal amount, we bought about twenty. “Why is she discarding these,” I asked in my innocence. KW

[The top picture was taken in the dining room at the farmhouse. My dad's younger sister is celebrating her 51st birthday in September 1961. I'm standing beside her (12 years old), as my mother watches. The bottom picture is Christmas 1961 -- Becky Reece, Polly Profitt, L.J. Reece, and Kyle Walrath.] KW