Digital Memories

The emergence of the digital camera was a life-changing moment in my growth, expansion, opportunity and education of all things photography. The digital era has led to a revolution on all levels in my life. I can remember for as long as I’ve had a camera, I was inspired hugely to create and capture those perfect moments in time. The only thing that held me back was the monetary costs of buying film and processing my visual moments of captured delight. And then along sauntered digital point and shoot cameras. Initially, the quality left something to be desired, but the concept of a minimal outlay of money with no aftermarket expenditures was exciting beyond words. But I waited … for at least 4 years before trusting in the technology, waiting for the opportune time to invest in my cre8tivity.

Fast forward to this weekend. I went home to my Mom & Pat’s farm to tackle a project, which I’ve been requested to complete for several months now. Flashback to my childhood:  my Mother was very astute and diligent in capturing the magic moments of the early years of my two sisters and brother. Thoughtfully, she processed most of her photos as slides for the sole purpose of having yearly slideshows — our version of home movies.

Over the years, as an adult, I’ve come to appreciate the history behind family photographs, and since the digital era became a strong force in my life, I’ve wanted to digitize all the slides Mom had kept, neatly tucked away in organized and clearly itemized archives. Wanting to get away for a weekend home, Mom slyly persuaded me into tackling this project, which seemed beyond the measure of a weekend’s work. Yet in the form of 30 or so categorized slide trays, Mom and I efficiently and with ease went through each box, 1 by 1, deciding on whether to keep or throw away the encapsulated moment. Thankfully, Mom had picked up a special tray for viewing multiple slides. This made the job somewhat easier to sort through them all, and come Monday morning after two whole days of perusing, purging, scanning and cataloguing the memories from 1966 through to 1989, we had an assortment of 750 slides to immortalize the life of our family in its growing years.

I must admit, this indeed was a time-consuming arduous task. I wasn’t expressly satisfied with the quality of the scan right from the beginning, especially when Mom told me that she paid a steep $80 price tag for the hardware & software. However, Mom was happy with the result. And if Ma is happy, I am thrilled.

As an interesting side note, through the journey of trying to navigate the Windows environment with a mediocre product, I successfully installed Windows on my MACBook Pro with the help of VMWare Fusion. However, I didn’t get the Windows executable program for the slide scanner to boot up properly on my MAC. A shame really, considering that the processing speed of my computer would have completed the project in half the time of Mom’s PC. In all honesty, when I witnessed a working version of Windows XP on my laptop, I didn’t know whether to feign excitement or sob uncontrollably at the irony of it all. Here’s a quote from my Facebook status page:

Hurrah to dedicated teamwork and persistent guidance / coaxing from all parties involved with our walk down memory lane. So happy that my sister and her husband were there to share in the overall experience. We also built a few new memories, welcoming my ‘sister’ Reggie to the family. She is a gorgeous 7 week old puppy … a Border Collie / Blue Healer mix. Reggie has sharp anxious teeth, but is extremely smart, attentive and playful as can be! Love her fluffy little heart to pieces. This was a grand weekend on a fabulous scale!