Photo Friday: My Old Is New Again

As an early Christmas present to myself, I bought a slide scanner, which Lori quickly confiscated, wrapped, and made me wait to Christmas Day to play with it.

Before the digital photography age, I was an avid photographer—especially in the years that I worked in a camera store. Back then, I would be able to purchase film at an unbelievable discount; the biggest discount was with slide film. And E-6 processing was free.

So I shot almost exclusively with slide film, and I went through it like a drunken sailor goes through his pay when he reaches port.

Every once and a while—usually no more than once or twice a year, I would host slideshow parties, but I would never trap my friends to showings of my holidays. We would have a regular party, with drinks and snacks, and folks would socialize. But at some point in the party, I would fire up the slide projector and I would show 100 of my personal favourite photos. These would be random shots, possibly of flowers, sunsets, nature, or architecture. I wouldn't stop and talk about the photos: I would simply bring a shot up onto the screen, let it rest for three seconds, and move on to the next one. In less than seven minutes, the show would be over and we would resume the party.

Painless.

Over the years, I had shot thousands and thousands of photographs, and as my slide collection grew, I printed some of my favourites and then archived all of the slides into albums, which I have stored away. A few years ago, I pulled out a couple of my slides and scanned them with a flatbed scanner, but I then lost the files when our computer crashed and I hadn't backed them up.

With our new computer, our old scanner was missing some drivers and I couldn't find the disc, nor could I download the driver from the manufacturer. And so my slides remained in their albums, neglected.

Until this week.

I have scanned almost 300 of my slides so far, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Want to see some? It is Photo Friday, after all.

Don't worry: I'll only give you a few.

Recognize this church? This photo was shot in 1989,
 but I recently took a similar shot—in July of this year.

Also from 1989, this is the rail crossing on Fallowfield Road
when there were only two undivided lanes.

Berlin Wall, West Berlin, 1988

My first photo with my Minolta X-700, in the summer of 1986.

That's enough for now. I will be scanning all of my slides over the coming months (years?) and will pull more out for upcoming Photo Fridays.

And then we can party.