printed over a week by pharmacies and returned in packs of 24 or 36 along with the film negatives – then kept in a box. The solution – I took all my negatives to a local Doha photographic studio and they scanned all my negatives onto DVD. For those photos I didn’ t have negatives for like old-school photos or photos inherited from relatives – I scanned them at the highest resolution and added them to my cloud folder. While I haven’ t yet thrown out, or passed on, the physical envelopes of printed photos – the time will come and I can be assured that if my boat sinks moving my life’ s possessions to my next expat destination at least my photos are safely stored in a virtual cloud!
5Ready, steady, action
During my most recent declutter fest I came upon a drawer filled with old,
unlabelled videos and Betamax tapes, this was another situation where I almost felt defeated. But help was no further than a Google search away in the form of another professional photography store that blended old technology to retrieve my celluloid memories with modern technology and convert everything to DVD. Specialist photographic studios are familiar with multiple types of video tapes, storage disks and cassette tapes so take expert advice on retrieving lost data from these mediums. Again, a little investment is involved but peace of mind is priceless.
Paperwork – my bête
6 noire
I love paper – I always have and I suspect I always will- but enough was enough when I found a stash of used, faded 1986 bus tickets to unmemorable destinations. Utilising my project management skills I set about categorising all my paper junk and started to scan.
Scanning, and the art of digital archiving, is an amazing guilt-free method of quickly digitising paper memories by creating an exact copy of the item that can be shared easily and stored in multiple locations and the original discarded- well maybe. It’ s highly addictive!
Luckily we have a scanner that can accommodate several pages at a time – particularly useful for those pages of recipes torn from magazines over two decades
Top tips for photographing children’ s art
• Select an area with lots of natural light, not direct sun but soft lighting.
• Choose a sheet of white foam board, a white sheet or a simple wooden floor to make a plain background.
• Place the artwork on the foam board and stand right above it – taking the shot straight down.
• Get your children to help by taking their artwork to the‘ photography studio’ and get them to share them with family and friends.
• Take some test shots. If you are using an automatic camera, make sure the flash is off; natural light should be enough.
• Keep shooting using the same position until you have finished! or even old bank and utility statements. I won’ t sugar-coat it- it took some time to scan 30 years of paper memorabilia but once scanned I shredded the originals and yes, saved everything to Dropbox!
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Today
’ s artwork is tomorrows archive!
As Mother’ s Day approaches our children will lovingly pass us beautiful hand-made works of art made at school or nursery celebrating this wonderful day of the year. Nothing evokes more memories of a time and place than children’ s artworks. While my scanner has undoubtedly been my saviour in my battle against paper, my only real struggle was with children’ s artwork. How do you scan macaroni embedded calendars? The answer is you don’ t … you photograph them. This technique also works well for oversized paperwork, pages from scrap books and items too large for a scanner.
8Turning digital archives into new treasures
One of the most exciting things about digital archiving is the opportunities it creates to develop new treasures from old memories. Online entrepreneurs have recognised this trend and you can now use children’ s artwork to create e-books, 3D soft characters, keychain, poster, pillow or quilts. New memories in the making.
Each family has their own set of precious documents but whether it’ s an inky footprint of your baby at six hours old or a grocery list written by your great-grandmother, it’ s worth considering now how you can preserve and pass on these memories to the next generation. Technology is there to help more than ever so although it’ s still early in the year, start considering if you might add going paperless to your next New Year resolutions
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