The Pure Joy of Living in the Moment

My mother was mad about photos. They were among her most prized possessions. She took them, got copies of others and put together an enormous collection.

My parents both worked at summer camps for about six or seven years and my mom's self-imposed responsibility was taking pictures of everything that took place each summer. She put them in soft cover books and every time one of the kids from camp would visit my folks in the off-season, they would visit my mom's library and spend hours reliving each moment.

As the years passed after her summertime stint, the camp memories began to fade. Fewer people came to visit and there were fewer opportunities to look at them. The books of photos from 1967 through 1973 went into a closet and then a box and then ultimately stored in the basement.

My mom passed away nearly ten years ago. For most of the time since, I didn’t know where those photos were. I moved them, put them in other boxes and stored them in my own basement. They were even placed in a box without being labeled, so I'd long forgotten exactly where they were.

Over the past few years, people from that time in our lives have asked me about them. The camps my family worked in are long defunct and so the only living testaments to them –besides the ones inside the people who shared the experience--are the photos or the 8mm and super 8mm film in boxes.

Well, I found them. Actually, I came upon them by accident but dragged the box upstairs to my home studio and began to remove them from the collectors’ books they were in. All of the photos were small 3x3 prints, most were faded away or had begun their fade and many stuck to the book. There were well more than a thousand photos.

But the experience of going through them and preparing them for scanning and then viewing the finished scans on my own computer, tinkering with them or changing the cropping was exhilarating. I traced the period of time that meant so much to my family photo by photo. I found myself in the moment with each picture. I could get there in a flash and stayed as long as I wanted or until the next photo came up.

I was almost too late to bring them back to life. As time passed, they would have faded more. They would have gotten mold or dust or would have been lost. I already saw that when we showed the pictures to the kids, they loved seeing my brother and I as youngsters but for most of them, they were just a bunch of old pictures of days long since passed--like World War II or the Renaissance for that matter!

But for my brother and I, they were an open window; allowing us to peer back into a time we loved. I’m thrilled to have that time memorialized now on DVD, watchable at a moment's notice and there to show anyone who’d care to watch.

Im glad my mother took it upon herself to photograph this period of time. I can’t watch them with her, but just by the subjects of each picture, she was editorializing and I clearly got the message. So in a way, I was watching those moments in time right along with her.

Photo Sharing Sites Are Our New History Books

It’s amazing to me how many photo sharing sites there are. From our own computers, we simply upload photos we want to have shared, choose whether to do so publicly or privately and follow the instructions. From there, your photos are online for those you want to see them, download them or print them.

I think it’s one of the most remarkable advancements in the effort to communicate the nature of our lives with others.

The concept first gathered steam in the late 1990’s and by now, there are almost too many sites to choose from. Within those sites you’ll find templates for all kinds of things including e-cards, slide shows and books. But it gets even more incredible when you realize that you don’t even have to be tethered to your computer to send and receive photos. Your phone can do it for you. Within seconds of taking or retrieving a photo, it can be anywhere that has a delivery capability, like another phone or computer.

Now, many sites include video as well, so most of your media can be shared with someone across the street or around the world--no mailing photos, no sending DVDs. And it happens fast.

So why am I talking about photo sharing sites when I have a photo and slide scanning and video transfer business? The answer is simple. There are an estimated 3.5 trillion photos out there still on paper. There are a vast amount of slides and videos as well. I’d love to see them all digitized, put on safe media to last 50 years or more and then be done with them. A one-time effort and we can recover the space they’re taking up and avoid the great potential for disaster by losing them to fire or flood. More important than that, we can communicate our visual histories with those who are part of it and those we want to provide a glimpse to. However, until your photos, slides and videos have been digitized, you can’t use these sites to do it.

Consider this. You have a couple of thousand pictures that pretty much make up your family’s history. You can have them all scanned, improved and put on DVD for storage and later viewing. You can make copies for each of your four children, one for yourself and even one for the safe deposit box. Then your family’s history is safe and secure, no long reliant on boxes in a basement near a pipe that leaked. And the cost for all thsi is measured in hundreds, not thousands.

Since they will be digitized, you can choose the ones you want to upload. You can also choose the ones that will never see the light of day! You may want to do a collage or slide show with music and that will be available for people you want as well.

When your valuable memories are in a digital format, so many things are possible. When they remain on paper or on videotape, you are rolling the dice that they’ll be there, as you remembered them, when you open the box or slide the videocassette into the dwindling number of VCR’s out there.

I Can't Believe I Lost Them

For quite some time now I have been telling people about the importance of having their photos scanned.I've written about about, spoke in person about it and tried to get the message across that people could end up very sorry if they don't take the bull by the horns and scan their photos.

Since I opened The Scan Zone, I have heard terrible stories of people who lost their photos in a fire or a flood. Every photo scanning company has experience with a client or prospect who tells a story about losing photos to something--unfortunately, it's after the photos are lost.
Unfortunately, I can now count myself among those who have lost critical photos. I have been trying to make time when I could to scan my own family photos. I have the equipment and there is often down time so there was really no excuse not to finish the job. I estimate that there were about 25,000 pictures in my basement and I have been scanning them. From the time I began the project, it has been going well. Many of the photos were losing the battle to age and I have had to work with them to bring them back to life. But through it all, I was so fortunate that I didnt totally lose photos to something unforsee.

Well, that all changed today.

This morning I was looking through all the boxes in order to find some photos to bring to my brother's house. I wanted to bring him some photos that had to do with our Mom, who has been gone for nearly 10 years now. I opened a Rubbermaid storage bin and I immediately knew something wasnt right. I could smell mold. Strong. And when I started reaching in for some of the key pictures I knew were in there, many of the photos were fused together, like they were glued. They couldnt be separated and some practically came apart in my hands. They were destroyed. About 25 of those large protraits in cardbord holders were lost. Yeah, there was my college graduation and some other portraits I and my brother sat for. Then there were some pictures from my wedding. Gone too.

That wasnt even the worst. There were dozens of cardboard holders with photos of my parents, their friends and some of their relatives too. I remembered the pictures...they're were people at dinner at the lake, or they were having a fun night out on the town. Or they were all caught at a big table at a resort and I always love to see my old relatives looking so young and free..But I opened them and the mold must have destroyed them.

I was crushed. I held them in my hand and saw there was no way I knew to rescue them. Gone too were my grandparents at some sort of lodge event. Worse than that, I lost the family portrait set of my grandmother's family when she was only two yearsold--before arriving in the United States at the start of the last century!

WhenI put that Rubbemaid filled with picutres off to the side of the closet, I didnt consider the possibility that water damage from a small leak would ruin those wonderful photos. I took the all the folders and tried to see what I could do. Even the old reliable of a hair dryer wouldnt split them apart and I could not recapture those signature, historical family portraits.

So I'm left with a number of different kinds of feelings. I'm angry that these pictures were ruined on my watcgh. Im terribly saddened that these photos are gone and I can't get them back. I'm a little sheepish for falling into the exact trap thart Ive been telling people for all this time to avoid.
So, I'll say it once again, this time from deep within personal experience--please don't let your important photos be detroyed or fade away. Digitize them and save them to DVD so they can last 50 years or more. You wont regret it.

The Daunting Prospect of Having to Scan Your Photos

The prospect of taking your photos and scanning them so they can be stored in a digital format can be a daunting one. Many people have looked at their personal flatbed scanner and then at their thousands of photos and became paralyzed by the sheer size of the job. It's an enormous amount of individual scanning processes and it will take so much time that people back away and don't undertake the project at all.

That's too bad on several fronts. The potentially devastating outcome is when something happens between the time you decide to scan your photos and the time you actually get around to do it. Whether somebody passes away, or gets married, or divorced or any other life changing event occurs, you will have wished you would have made the time to undertake that scanning project. I know of a couple who had a terrible flood in their basement which ruined a grat amount of things that were in cartons--including a large number of their photos. Add to that the potential damage from storms or a fire or other unexpected happenstance and you can see how many things can affect your photos. That's in addition to typical temperature changes or storage inefficiencies which speed up deterioration.

It's so easy to understand why people are emotionally devastated when they return to their homes after being evacuated and find their possessions damaged and their memories lost.

But the face-off of you and your scanner versus the thousands of photos in boxes is not the only scenario you have. Your scanner will take 30 to 45 seconds for a scan, or about 10 scans in five minutes. Even if you bunch a few photos on the bed, maybe you'll be able to scan 40 photos in five minutes. But you don't have to scan them yourself at all and the cost to have someone else do it is probably far less than you think.

Today, you can have your photos scanned for about 20 cents a photo. That's 1,000 pictures scanned for $200. They will be scanned and digitized so they actually look better. A scanning service will typically be able to scan 30 photos in a minute or 150 in that same five minute time. They can be cropped an improved and then stored on disc for you to file, edit, catalogued and saved--for 50 years or more. You can make slide shows from them to show on any DVD or duplicate the DVD so others can have a copy. But whatever you do with them, they will be preserved.

Your photos are the roadmap of your life. Everyone important to you is in them and most everywhere you've been is there as well. Dont let them fade away or become damaged or worse.

The Personal Imagery of Thanksgiving

Today is the eve of one of the true, great American days. Of all the holidays in our year, it seems to me that Thanksgiving brings out the best in all of us. It symbolizes family, country and a vision for the peace and tranquility we all wish was ours. It also allows us to take a good cleansing exhale and reflect on those things we might be thankful about.

It is usually a multi--generational affair, bringing together children, parents, grandparents and some great-grandparents in there as well. We can see first hand see how strong the roots of family and friends are as we can look in the eyes of those who came before us and those who came after us at the same time.

It's also a day for picture taking. Whether it's the setting of the table, the standing or sitting around prior to the meal, the meal itself or the post-feast cleanup or the football games on tv in the other room, we furiously take photos of Thanksgiving. What a time to get that shot of this year’s newest, tiny addition to the family being held by the great grandmotherly hands of the family's matriarch. How amazing it is to watch grandpa's eyes while being treated to some exaggerated story of little league success by an eight-year-old. How fun it is to photograph the table and then look back on Thanksgiving’s passed and see that things haven't really changed all that much over the years—at least from a culinary point of vew.

We tend to take so many photos of the youngest people in our families -- -- after all there's nothing cuter than a completely candid photograph of a child. But if you look around, everyone is also taking those kind of shots. The really important shots to get are the ones that include the oldest at the table. They're the ones who have been shaping Thanksgiving celebrations for dozens upon dozens of years and the ones who are most at risk of being near the end of their time at your table.

In my family alone, this Thanksgiving will be celebrated through the veil of loss of three senior members of the clan over the past year or so.

That makes the picture’s we have of our families that much more precious to all of us. Your aunt may be gone, but her image remains largely due to your own memory but also in part to the photographs you have of her. That's why it's so important to make sure those photos, those special family collections, do not fade away and ultimately become irrelevant. You can digitize those photos by having them scanned and housed in your computer or on a DVD and they will live for another 50 years or more. It's very sad that too many of my own family’s pictures have suffered the fate of age. Sadder still that there are very few among us who can identify the people in the pictures.

However, if your photos are scanned and labeled on the spot, transferred to DVD and are kept safe there is no end to what you can do with them. You can make photo collages backed by inspirational or emotional music to play at next year's Thanksgiving. You can create a family documentary that chronicles your family via photos, interviews on video and previously recorded videotapes to give out to other family members.

The point is to keep the memory alive of everyone sitting at that table tomorrow. Thanksgiving day, that grand American holiday, represents the fabric of all we hold dear. It’s part of what connects one generation to the next. That little cousin you had is in charge of Thanksgiving every year because she grew up and those who once held that responsibility have passed on. Don't let your photos, videos and other memories of the day fade away. Keep them alive, scan them and save them. They are a part of you.

Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away. It's a perfect title for a song about your videos.

Anyone who has looked at their collection of VHS tapes knows about what I call The Big Fade. That's when your videos go soft at first and then ultimately start to disappear altogether. Of course, some wont even get as far as even being able to insert them into a machine becase the tape in the cassette became brittle and not usable. Then of course, if it does go in and there is a signal, watch out for all the dropout, which is the tape heads sliding through a section of tape that has lost its information. Your VHS has faded away.

You can cry out in anguish, as in "No! Not fade away!"
You can try to give it a stern order, as in "Not fade away! I command you."

Or you can look at a videocassette transferred to disc and breathe a sigh of relief and say "Ahhh, not fade away."

Each of these statements is very possible and it depends what you do with the VHS's you have lying around. If you do nothing with them, you might as well kiss them goodbye. They will fade and become unwatchable. That's assuming of course that somebody or something hasn't damaged them to the point where you can no longer put them into a VHS machine.

You are far better served by transferring your collection of VHS cassettes to DVD. First off, they will look better. The natural improving quality of DV will make your tapes look better. Secondly, you will make them last for a half century or more and third, you will easily be able to import them into any video creation software and edit parts of it at your discretion.

In many cases, more than one person will want a copy of the DVD. Easily done. You can make several if you need to, including one for your safe deposit box. Plus, as video editing software gets easier and easier, you'll have no problem cutting and recutting the footage to meet a specific need.

It's hard to believe there was a generation, just before my own, where there was little in the way of recorded voices to match the visuals. I've looked at some of those people on films and realized I never heard them talk. I'm lucky in that my parents celebrated their 25th Anniversary at a party in their honor many years ago and we videotaped the daylights out of that event. So, at least I had a vhs of it to hear and see them. But it was the only copy so transferring it to DVD was critical. Now my kids can see and hear their grandparents speak.

The videotape contained in the videocassettes is remarkably fragile. It loses its integrity very fast. But you have a line of defense. Transfer it to DVD and don't worry about it any longer. The children of Baby Boomers have the digital age in their back pockets. It's the Boomers themselves who are stuck with old films, videos and photos. Step one in their revival is to put them onto DVDs.

We Live in Two Worlds

We live in two worlds. At least from a photographic point of view we do.

Most of us have become quite familiar with digital photography, at least enough to be able to take photos, discard the ones we don't like and import the ones we do to any number of photo storage solutions. Many of us know there are nearly endless levels of sophistication for the pictures we take but--as happens so often --the photo we need is the one taken at the end of our outstretched arm with our phones.

This provides immediacy to our world and makes everyone a content provider. It doesn’t matter if one is an expert technician, or knows the basics of photography or has reasonably good equipment. In the end what seems to matter most is acquiring, saving and retrieving content deemed important to us or by us at any given time. That makes photography an immediate or perhaps even an instant medium.

But it wasn't always that way. In fact, many of us, if not most of us, have at least some experience in a world where photos were special. They were planned for, often staged, prepared for and taken. Them it was a highly anticipated event to receive those photos back from the drugstore or in the mail and determine which looked good, which were okay and which had to be hidden away so no one else would see them. They look so real--at least the good ones did. When well lit and well shot they could grab you like nothing else.

I remember thinking how near-genius it was when my mother order two copies of every picture in the roll. One copy went in one of her many photo scrapbooks and one was given to some relative or some adult who was, by happenstance, in the photo.

Most of us know or have some idea what to do with our digital pictures. Whether or not we all take a crack at it, we still know that there are software programs that allow us to change lighting, sharpen images, change portrait to landscape and even take red eye out. Plus we know we can make copies for ourselves, make prints for as many people as we want or even send those photos to a number of people limited only by the number of e-mail addresses we might have. Put them on the internet and there are no limits at all!

But what about that picture of me holding my brother on my lap. The cute one. The one where we both have big eyes and are looking straight into the camera. Wouldn't it be great if we could do the same thing with those paper photos that we can do with our digitally shot photos?

Of course, the answer is we can. Scan your pictures and they are in the same boat as your digital ones -- digitized and ready to last half century or more. Then you can alter them any way you want and send them to whomever you want and do so whenever you want.

We are lucky to be living in a time where our creativity is basically bound by no borders. All our photos from the digital age are part of that. By digitizing the rest of our photos, the ones from the “golden days of our lives,” they can be included in the future as well. There is no more important history than our own.

These People are in My Family?

It was part laughter and part sad irony. I found a whole bunch of photos of my family that were 70 or 80 years old. They were black and white of course and some were on extremely thick cardboard paper while others were little Polaroids. It was like looking at a series of museum photos until I realized that they were family members of mine.

I didnt know who they were, although some had writing on them so I could kind of build the structure of the photos. My family came here from overseas around 1900 and these photos were old enough that I couldnt be sure whether they were from here in the US or before they made the trip.

I wondered who these people were and what their lives were like. How much more simply they seemed to live. They lived a harder life than their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. But it was a lot simpler.

Did they really dress like that? What was attractive to each other? My grandmother's parents sure looked stern and I cant imagine how they had a whole lot of fun. What did they do before radio, tv or computer? Hard to know because there is no record of their thoughts or dreams. I dont even know who most of those people are, but I have a cousin who might be able to identify them.

I scanned them and will label them if I find out who they are. I don't like thinking that the generations disappear. I prefer to think that my kids and their kids will be able to appreciate the fact that they are part of our extended family with these unnamed and unidentified people at the helm. But if our pictures are never scanned, we will lose them to deterioration or to the inability to idenify them.

I honor my grandparents, I remember them very well. But it will probably end there as there are not enough photos of my grandfather to make a case for him to my own kids.

We do a great job with creating digital memories. There is so much content that I believe the generations that follow us will have plenty of content to play around with. And they'll have a wide array of media where family histories can be housed. But the first wave of photos? They are endangered. There are somewhere between three and four trillion photos out there and many of them have been lost to irrelevance. I want to make sure I can stop that wherever and whenever I can. I want to nurse and nurture my little family tree,

The Roadmaps of our Lives

By some estimates, there are somewhere between three and four trillion printed photographs out there. Some have little importance, either they are duplicates or out of focus prints or not the best depiction of the subject of the photo. Others are landscapes that look like so many other landscapes. Many fall into the "it seemed like a good picture at the time" category but if you've forgotten where you were or what was funny about putting your hands to your ears and acting like a moose. Those pictures really have very little value. Some not even worth the paper they're printed on.

But then, there are the gems. The ones that represent people, places or things that are an integral parts of your life life. They are our grandparents, our parents, our siblings, our grandchildren and every one of them, every time you see them, elicits an emotion inside you.

These photographs are the roadmaps of our lives. The list of what kind of photos would be special to each of us would be as long as a phone book. We keep them close to us--in wallets or in our offices, standing on shelves or hanging on walls of our homes. They are our treasures.

Unfortunately, few of us treat them as as the treasures they are. We too often banish them to boxes and then store them in locations where they can slowly deteriorate over a relatively short time. We keep them in places that can damaged by water, moisture, fire or the other environmental conditions that are out there.

Worse still, we all reach a time when those who might be able to identify everyone in a photograph or tell a story about the location are gone. Then what? We no longer have that part of our family's history. We have people that are standing near Grandma or Aunt Elizabeth that we can't identify. We don't know where the picture was taken or by whom. And, as such, they are gone. Images that no longer have any meaning to us.

Fortunmately, there is a way to avoid this. Scan them, digitize them, caption them and save them to DVD. You'll not only have the pictures for 50 years or more, you and your children and their children will know who the people in the photos are.

In my own life, I lost my father more than 30 years ago. I sometimes wonder whether my memories of him are of him in life or in the poses of the photos that are so familiar to me. I am so thankful I still have them. And I keep finding more. With every box of stored photos I open, I am treated to another, often forgotten chapter in my life. It's a visual history of my family and of my growing up.

It is as important to me as any history book has ever been.