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.

Ten Best

Meh.

"Just pick your best 10, Ross." Or something to that effect.

Easier said than done.

A couple of months ago, a friend reached out to me with an invitation. His small town was organizing a show at their art gallery, whereby photographers from Eastern Ontario and the surrounding regions would be displaying some photographs, and he thought that my photos should be included in the show.

He was a friend to the gallery and would also be displaying some of his work. "If I can sell even one of my photos, you'll be able to sell all of yours," he told me. I was humbled by his praise and accepted the invitation.

All I had to do, he said, was to select 10 of my photos. There is no theme for the show, as of yet. "We'll come up with one once we've seen all the entries."

There were a couple of photos that immediately came to mind, and my friend even suggested one of those images. "I know exactly where we'd hang it in the gallery. It's sort of the place of honour."

Again, I was humbled.

Very few of my photos have been printed. In our house, there are only so many walls upon which we can hang a print. A couple of years ago, when DW and I were converting Kid 1's room into a study—after she had moved out—we printed a half dozen or so of my photos, most of which took up the walls in this room; one, that adorns the hallway on our second floor; and another that we've hung over our bed.

A lot of those photos have meaning for us but when I look at them with a more critical eye, I wonder if they have any kind of market appeal?

Some, no.

So, in early January and over this past weekend, I started going through all of my photos with one question in mind: would a stranger find any of my photos good enough to want to hang on their walls? It's one of the hardest questions I can put to myself because I'm extremely critical of my photos. There are perhaps only a handful of them that I feel are good enough to hang in a gallery.

I say I've started going through all of my photos, but that's a gross over-exaggeration. Going back more than 40 years, I've taken tens of thousands of photos. Years ago, I had purchased a scanner to transform my 35mm negatives and slides into digital files, and I've only scanned a small fraction of them, yet still have a digital file folder that is holding thousands of these converted image files.

My thousands of 35mm photos, in of themselves, make only a small fraction of photos I've shot, as the digital age allowed me (and every other photographer) to shoot countless shots, not having to worry about film.

It's a blessing and a curse, am I right?

I like to think that I've digitized the best of my old photos, so I've sorted which of those I'm considering for the exhibit. There are only two of those, and one, I've already printed on a 24" x 36" canvas. The other shot is in a file folder with other images that I've looked at and have considered potential for printing.

DW, who is unapologetically my biggest critic, has already pointed to some of the photos on our walls and has said, "That one would sell." I've shown her some of my unprinted images, to which she's said "Meh," or "Maybe," or "Nope."

DW liked this photo until I said the sky was fake: she then gave it a hard "Nope!"

So the search is on for my 10 best photos of all time. And once that search is over, the next step will be to decide the size that I want to print that image, what frame I want to place it in, and (most difficultly) how much to charge for each print.

I still have plenty of time: the show will be held in July. But knowing my penchant for procrastination, the months could go by in no time. I've given myself until the end of February to choose the 10 images and until the end of March to decide the size, mat, and frame.

If you've been following The Brown Knowser for a while and have seen my end-of-year, favourite-photos posts or if you've encountered a photo in any of my other posts and think it's worthy of exhibiting (Wordless Wednesday, Photo Friday), let me know in the Comments section, below.

I'll provide more information about the show when a firm date is set. It is likely to run from a couple of weeks to a month, depending on the interest. If you're in the Eastern Ontario region, or nearby, I'd love to see you there.

Stay tuned.

Framed

This post is an appeal for information: something that I don't do often, as few readers leave me any comments. But I need your help.

I'm mainly looking for help in the Ottawa area but will also take suggestions by anyone in Canada or the United States, within reason.

I'm looking for picture frames: frames that would fit a 16" x 9" photo, preferably with a mat. The frame would preferably be black but I would also consider white or silver.

I'm looking to print some of my photos and I've cropped some of them to this dimension. I've looked on Amazon for frames with this dimension but I'm often reluctant to use Amazon and, anyway, I haven't seen anything that matches what I need.

An example of what I want to print.

I've started looking into custom frame shops, and after I got over initial sticker shock, I'm still pursuing this line but I'm looking for recommendations.

I don't know if soliciting help through my blog site is the best avenue but I thought I'd cast a wide net. Or put multiple irons in the fire. Or put my eggs in different baskets.

Whatever.

I have shopped at IKEA for most of my picture frames but they don't seem to make frames in this dimension. The frame could even be 32 x 18 or anywhere in between that size and 16 x 9, but I need that dimension.

If you have a good suggestion, please leave it in the Comments section. If you don't want to leave it there, please e-mail me at brownknowser@gmail.com. Or you can reach out to me directly if you know any of my other means of communication.

Getting prints of my photos to match those dimensions is another challenge but I think I can handle that one.

Thanks in advance.

Photo Friday: Putting It In Print

It would be an understatement to say that, since I've been photographing with digital cameras, I have taken thousands of photos. Tens of thousands of photos.

I look around my house and I look at the number of those photos that I have actually printed, and I come up with two. Two photos: one, printed to a 4 x 6 print, of the whole family, when the girls were very young—maybe two and four. We shot it early in the morning, as the kids joined us to snuggle in bed. It was a happy morning, and the photo was shot with a point-and-shoot camera.

It was a basic camera taking a basic, happy family moment.

The other photo, a 5 x 7, shows the four of us, two summers ago, standing at the Rideau locks by the Chateau Laurier, our canoe held over our heads, as we finished our 200-km journey from Kingston to Ottawa. It was a triumphant moment, captured on my Nikon D80, my first and former D-SLR.

My mom took the shot when she came to get us.

Two photographs out of tens of thousands.

When I shot 35mm film, I constantly made prints of my photographs, had them mounted on plaques or hung in frames. In my old apartment, one long wall was lined with dozens of shots that I proudly displayed.

That art seems to have disappeared in the digital age.

But no more.

This week, I received a canvas print of one of my photographs that I shot on my recent trip to New York City. It's one of my favourite shots of that trip. I shared it when I returned home but was too tired to put out a proper blog post. It was a lazy post with one of my best photos.

It's now printed on a 24 x 36 canvas, and it looks like a painting. It's a work of art, if I may be so bold.

And now I want to print more.

Next up, this shot, taken on my last Brown Knowser Photo Walk. Again, I'm thinking 24 x 36. Thoughts?

The NYC subway shot looks so good, I'm thinking of making more and selling it. What do you think? I mean, every time I see the prints in Ikea, I think, I can take as good a photo, can't I? My NYC subway shot is as good as anything I've seen in that store.

Would you be willing to put one of my photos on your walls?

Happy Friday!