Wednesday, February 23, 2005

One down...

Projects come and projects go.

Monday I finished one that turned out to be a medium-sized bite: scanning my mother-in-law's negatives. She'd given me an envelope full of negatives to scan around Christmas time, I guess. She figured there were about a hundred or so. The count was 748 when I finished Monday morning.

I had fun getting to know my father-in-law's family. His dad died when he was only 14. His mom died a couple of years ago. His sisters were going to throw the negatives away.

There were too many negatives to be re-printed, so scanning was a good option. Most of the negatives weren't on standard 35mm film. They were much bigger. I had to tape most of them to the negative attachment on my scanner. There were lots of good pictures in there. There were lots that weren't quite so good: out of focus, out of plumb, double-exposed, or with no discernible reason for having been taken. Still, it is a treasure-trove of previously unseen images. It was fun to scan and enhance each picture. I put them into categories: Prom, Graduation, Dogs, Cars, Cats, Beach, Old Boyfriends, Snow Piles, Dress Up. Mostly I just numbered them, though. I even found a few with my baby-sized wife in them.

Now that the negatives have been scanned, I can go back to my regular evening activities: working through family group records, scanning my old journals, scanning letters and other documents, adding obituaries to my database, creating the preliminary family organization mailing list...

It's almost too-bad, though: she couldn't get too upset at me for playing on the computer while I was doing a project for her mom.

No comments: