Scattered Memories

I had written a post for last Friday, but because of a missing photograph, I ended up not posting it.

I may post it for an upcoming Photo Friday post if I find that photo, but my hopes are waning. You see, the photo in question is a printed, 35mm film photograph, and it seems as though I've misplaced the entire series of prints from that event.

That event, by the way, was DW's and my trip to Italy, in 2004. And it was the trip where I was transitioning from 35mm film to digital photography.

Just before that vacation, DW and I were considering getting a pocket camera for the trip, as DW was tired of carrying her SLR and our existing compact cameras were getting toward the end of their life. My Nikon One Touch, which I had bought in the late 80s, had a broken flash: the Pentax ESPIO 115 camera that we had bought while we were in Korea never took great pictures and we had a battery leak in it. After cleaning it up, it was never reliable again.

We still have it kicking around
and it still works.
All 3.2 megapixels.

We figured it was time to try one of those new-fangled digital cameras, so we bought a Canon PowerShot A70. DW used this camera while I still hung onto my Minolta X-700 (though, I did take a couple of shots with the new camera).

When we returned home from the trip, I submitted my film to our local camera shop (the one in which I had worked for many years) and we burned photos from the digital camera onto a CD. We also printed a couple of our favourite digital shots.

When I picked up the prints, I also purchased a photo album to hold all of our recorded memories. DW and I were going to make a scrapbook of this trip to Tuscany and Cinque Terre.

Of course, in 2004, we had a three-year-old and a one-year-old that were our prime objects of attention and we were focused on caring for them that we never found time for assembling our scrapbook. And when we had two bundles of joy, why would we want to take time to organize photographs?

Nineteen years later, I have no idea where the photo album or the printed photographs went. Last Thursday, as I searched for the one photograph that I wanted to add to Friday's post, I came to the realization that they are lost to the abyss that is our basement.

Decades ago, I was really good at organizing my photos. I had binder-style albums that held pocketed sheets, each sheet held four 4 x 6 photographs per side. I have at least a dozen of those large albums, packed to bursting with photos that date back to the 1970s.

I have several binders full of 35mm negatives, each page labelled with the subject and date. And I have more albums, similar to the print albums, that hold thousands of slides.

As I searched for the photos of our 2004 Italy trip, I came across shoe boxes that were stuffed with random photographs. It seems that sometime, in the early 90s, I stopped being so organized.

There are a lot of memories in those shoe boxes and I just might share some in upcoming Throwback Thursday blog posts, but these memories are as scattered as the photos seem to be.

Over the weekend, I also searched the old CDs that contain our digital memories. I've started pulling those files and organizing them into the photo database that I now keep on several portable hard drives.

At least those aren't scattered.

The search for the lost Italy photos continues.