AV News 178 - November 2009
How Are You Keeping?
Maurice Dybeck ARPS
No, this is not an enquiry about your health but a challenge to make decisions
about all that redundant audio visual material that we have on our shelves.
The recent news of the end of Kodachrome is a stark reminder that times have
changed. What was once the mainstay of Kodak ended up counting for only
one percent of its business. Pause for nostalgia.
I bought my first reel of Kodachrome (could only afford one) for an
expedition to Iceland in 1953. It went into a lecture set made from black &
white negatives, converted and assembled by Boots in glass mounts for, I
think, two shillings each. Kodachrome came back in five days, ready
mounted! This was our first colour experience and it drew many people into
the projecting pictures habit. Colour prints mounted in fat albums and then
those wretched flip albums came many years later, as that collection on many
a bottom shelf in living rooms reveal. No doubt you will keep these albums
forever but what do we all do with those boxes and boxes of slides?
Colleagues in AV News have
been offering various ways of
converting them to digital. I
rather balk at ones which
take over one minute per
slide to convert and scanning
"ten slides a night" as
advised by Graham Blackwell
(Page 30 Issue177 August
2009) is going to take me
quite a while. I have 14,000
slides on the shelf! But the
problem is not so much
"how".
We need first to decide whether or not we want to keep them all in digital
format anyway. As with film-making (my background) the test should be to
keep only the very best and to many of you this will mean the ones that ended
up in Sequences. Scrap the rest! I agree that it is heartbreaking to tip
hundreds of lovely pictures into the bin but think: who is ever going to look at
them again? Even those holiday pictures of places and events from which you
didn't make a sequence.
But hold on, there are one or two last hopes for what you might do with
them. Have you noticed that Google Earth likes people to send in pictures that
get slapped on to maps to show what is (or was) to be seen? And there are
sometimes appeals for good pictures of places and buildings long since gone.
In this connection I recall that during the War people were asked to send in
pre-war pictures of French beaches which might one day assist the invasion
landings. Then of course you could always develop your own website if your
ego goes that way. Only today I have blogged into someone's views of fellow
explorers of the early fifties.
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