Digital Memories
![Mom, Pat and Reggie Family](http://rvthereyet.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_8229.jpg)
![Pat mowing the yard lawn mower](http://rvthereyet.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_8213.jpg)
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:
Dear Windows … you are now a guest in my house of goD (i.e. the MACBook Pro). If you play nice, you can stay awhile. Any smart alecky moves — virus downloads, etc. — and you’re outta here!
![Reggie Reggie](http://rvthereyet.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_8114.jpg)
![Echinacea Echinacea](http://rvthereyet.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/IMG_8173.jpg)
Are you trying to take slides and put them on to your MAC? If so I did this a few years back. I got 2 pieces of PVC pipe and made a device that fits over the lens of my Olympus digital. I place a slide in the apparatus, snap a picture, knock the slide out and repeat the process. I can do about 100 slides an hour that way. Place them in folders, use Photoshop to clean up and away you go. If you are interested I can send a photo of that I made.
I’d love a photo! Thank you for the awesome tip!!!