The reason for this talk came about with both my 2nd daughter and wife having significant birthdays. The question is what to do about it. Maybe a photo show?
We have all got a lot of photographs.If we haven’t taken them ourselves, one or more of the family has. When my mum died there was a suitcase of old photos most of them black and white and most 2” by 3”. There were some bigger ones and quite a few had the details of the photo written on the back and a lot didn’t.
More recently there were slides and we took hundreds of slides in the 1960’s mainly on Kodachrome film. We had a projector and we showed all and sundry our latest exploits. We have all sat through slide shows which were all very interesting to the photographer.
Later again people took printed photos and we (my wife) put them in photo albums. These were especially valuable when the children were growing up. Sometimes we used albums for records of our trips.
In the last 10 years digital cameras came along firstly fairly low quality and later much higher quality. These were inexpensive to run and to store. Now even computers are able to take photographs and telephones can take photos as well. In a couple of years maybe your washing machine will be able to. You can now take a photo of yourself on holiday and send it off instantly to almost anywhere in the world.
What are we going to do with these thousands of photos that we have taken?
I have a strong opinion about this.
These are a historic record of our family or trip or whatever else we have photographed.
It is our responsibility to protect our little bit of history.
At the very least we should write on the back of the photos who is in them and where and when they were taken.
Next stage is to make a photo album.
You can make a family tree and these are examples of part of my family as prepared by Robyn.
But photos deteriorate and may or may not be useable by the next generation.
With easily obtained technology we can scan or photograph the old photos and store them on Computers, DVD’s, flash drives or a number of other ways.
We can even store them on the internet.
Now we have the photos in a digital format and we can have fun with them.
Firstly take copies in case the originals get lost. Store the copies away from your home in case your house burns down.
We can make up programmes to show at special events. Could be a birthday party or wedding anniversary or to celebrate someone’s life.
In earlier years we prepared “sound-slide” programmes. The best exponent was Graeme Hasler who later moved into movie making.
At the easiest level we can let the Windows operating system do a slide show.
Or use Power Point to give better control and even to add music.
Another alternative is to use our video editing software to flossie it up a bit. We can mix slides and film together as well and put in titles and music.
Or you can ask your video editing software to do it for you. Power Director and a number of other editing suites have a movie maker built in. They are quite clever and can put slides and movies into a spectacular form. Interesting to try - you are likely to be surprised at the outcome.
So there you are.
My message is:-
"Don’t leave your old photos to deteriorate in the cupboard.
Do something with them. Use them in an album, Family Tree, or make some films with them. And most importantly have fun."
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