The Importance of a Single Old Photo

It’s so interesting what happens to people when they start to prepare their photos for a scanning project. Pictures that were not even a part of their thinking just days earlier or had once been moments a photographer captured for their family so long ago have become quite critical.

I have been trying to figure out why those important photos are not displayed on mantles or in digital frames above the fireplace or as part of slide shows available to family and friends on Flickr or other sites. And I believe I know the answer. While the present is with us day in and day out, the past is only with us when we open the door and let it in. However, during those moments when the past does come calling, it is a strong, almost irresistible force that must be reckoned with.

We’ve all gotten songs in our heads that we remembered we liked back then. I’ve spent hours trying to find it online, or even find different versions of it. I didn’t have it in my collection because for years, it wasn’t important enough to have. But then, it became part of my thinking and it couldn’t be denied until it was located, downloaded and made part of my collection.

We have visions of our parents, or our early friends or aunts and uncles and even our kids when they were little. While we do keep many of them in our thinking, they are the images we have chosen as representative of these people. But compare that image of your Mom in your head with that photo of her with her friends when she was 18 and living in Brooklyn. They are quite different visions and without seeing those photos, we’d fall back onto a representative image path we have of them—instead of the multi-faceted road they actually walked on,

The late singer-songwriter Steve Goodman had a song called “My Old Man” where he talks about his father not long after he died. One of the verses was about his Dad in his early days—fighting in World War II and the things he did before he met his Mom and shortly after became “My old man.”

They all had full lives above and beyond the one we share or shared with them. Their photographs capture them in times that we might not have been a part of but were a big part of their lives nevertheless. There were also moments, captured on film, that express early days in their relationship with us. I have photos of my parents when they only knew me for just a year or two. No long history yet. No conflicts. No lessons, lectures, generation gaps, estrangements, reinvigorated relationships, them growing older, meeting their grandkids and finally the slowing down and ultimately their passing. They are fresh and real and are big parts of our relationships with them.

All these images are there. Right in those boxes they way they were (and many still are in my basement). My kids never knew their grandfather so I’m so lucky to be able to point to him and tell them about his smile or his compassion and how much fun he was. But more than that, there’s nothing like my children pointing to his picture and saying ”Gee, you smile just like him” or “was he as kind as he looked?”

Those photos of your family are in your basement subject, to the humidity or in your attic, subject to the dryness or in albums, falling victim to the chemicals in the plastic you thought would protect them. Please scan them and preserve them, either via the Scan Zone or through some other way so they won’t fade or be destroyed or rendered useless by their storage. When you finally do think of them and do want to show them, they will, at that moment, be the most important portrayal of the past you have. Keep them alive.

Scan-a-thon for Local Food Pantry is Off and Running

The Scan-a-thon for People to People, Rockland County's largest food pantry is off and running. The Scan Zone will scan photos, slides, convert VHS to DVD and more for its donors and 30% off the top of each bill will go to People to People--in cash.

I'm thrilled to be involved in this one. There are 49 million people in the U.S. who are "food insecure," or unsure of where their next meal is coming from. That's one in six people! In New York State and the county I live in, Rockland County, those statistics are very similar and it means that about 40,000 people are in that situation tonight. In fact one in eight people are receiving some sort of emergency food aid in the U.S. Nearly 37 million people!

The truth of the matter is that if this Scan-a-thon can raise meaningful money to purchase food and that food gets right out to people who really need it, then what powerful a program this is. Think of it, someone who was mulling over scanning their photos anyway will have them scanned and, at the same time, will see money go to People to People--not from them--but from the Scan Zone. The client doesn't donate a penny. I'm quite sure that if that client wanted to add to that donation to the food pantry, that would be alright with everyone.

The Scan-a-thon is a great idea and it will be used for other organizations whose donor base wants to see funds flow to the organization they are connected to without having to come to them to write more checks. There will be additional Scan-a-thons announced over the next few months but this one for People to People leads it off.

It seems to me that more things like this are needed. We are at a time when need is increasing very fast and the resources to satisfy that need is shrinking at alarming rates. We are seeing the first decrease in philanthropy in almost a generation at a time when places like food pantries and food banks are, in many cases, seeing their clients double in number.

There's an ominous statistic from Feeding America, the umbrella group for almost 90% of hunger organizations. That is that more than half of food pantries in the country say they are in danger of having to shut down because of either a lack of funds or a lack of access to food they can afford to acquire and redistribute.

So it's only natural and it's absolutely important to do as many Scan-a-thons as the Scan Zone can. There are many organizations out there that need help. This can be our way of joining the fight to help make our communities better and help put people in a good place. If you want information on the People to People Scan-athon, simply go to the Scan Zone Facebook page. Believe me, someone you know is in need--they probably would never want to let you know about it, but they are. These fundraisers can help make it better for them.

Give Mothers and Fathers a Gift That Will Transport Them

One of the great things that can tie a family together is their photographs. They chronicle the unity we tend to find in our families and when put together in a collection, they can bring the strongest individualists to their knees, surrendering to their memories. Who hasn’t had their hearts opened wide by seeing their parents or grandparents or even themselves in younger days? We see whom we are as well as see where we came from and can transport ourselves to another time, just by viewing our photo collections.

For this Mothers Day and Fathers Day, let me suggest something. Instead of a typical, sincere but run of the mill gift for them, think about giving them something they could really get their hands around—their past. Give them the story of their lives by taking their photos, having them scanned and saved to DVD. You’ll be giving them the warm feelings that come with recollecting their favorite times and, at the same time, you’ll be saving their photos from deterioration, assuring future generations will be able to see them.

Think of it…..you can collect their photos, put them in an order that would make sense to them, have them scanned and put into a medium they are comfortable with. You can then sit down with them to watch and listen as they talk about people, places and things that were so important in their life story.

You can import the photos into your computer and turn them into a slide show with music or we can do it for you. It will end up on a DVD, which they can watch on their own TV and you can watch it with them. Or you can take those photos—even with music--and put it on a photo site or even put it on YouTube. There are so many ways to use the pictures or show the pictures; but it all relies on one thing—getting those family pictures scanned. Without them in a digital format, they continue to be at risk from damage, poor storing, heat, humidity, dryness and a host of other things.

Mothers Day is next month; Fathers Day is the month after that. There’s a reasonable chance your parents even got married somewhere in the latter part of spring. There is still time to have their photos scanned for them and do the related work to make a presentation.

Think about it. With every passing year, the value of those we’ve encountered along the way or the moments we shared with those we love become more cherished. I let the opportunity to do that pass until it was too late and my parents were gone. Many of my friends did too.

This gift will allow the doors of emotion to swing wide open. Most of our parents lived in a time when a photograph was seen as a portrait of the moment. Give all those moments back to them so they can relive each one over and over again.

Rescue Your Important Photos from the Cruel Fate of Deterioration

It seems like I’ve been heading out to visit relatives on the holidays for more than 50 years…Actually, I have! We all have--whether for 50 years or less. There are certain days of the year you get dressed nicely, pack up and go.

The one thing most of our holiday celebrations have in common is that someone takes a picture of someone. Sometimes, the celebration included a large amount of picture taking. People who are now passed on or are quite old today were young back in those photos. Real depictions of our lives could be found in the composition and the background of those pictures. And, for all of us, any photo taken prior to the last 10 years was probably done via film and printed on paper.

Where did we put those important, isolated stories of our lives? For most people, they wound up in boxes and stored in the basement or attic. Those seeking to display or protect those photos would put them in albums first and then put them in the boxes in the basement or the attic.

Over time, people died or divorced or moved and those photos were shuffled around to different places—different basements or attics. As the photos grew more distant in time from the day they were taken, we tended to treat them with less care than the ones recently snapped.

The bottom line is our photos were being destroyed. Many already are and many will be there soon. What’s worse, we may have originally thought we were protecting them by putting them in albums when, instead, we were actually dooming them to become faded, colorless blobs with little or no relevance.

Here’s why and what you ought to do about. When we put our “best” or most important photos in albums we didn’t realize the poly vinyl chloride in the plastic would literally suck the color and the luminance of the photo right out. So the first thing to do is get them out the albums and into Ziploc bags. You could take the opportunity of getting them scanned at the Scan Zone (1,000 photos for $250), but the most important thing is to get them out of those albums.

Once scanned, you could create digital photo albums that are easily accessible online. They could be available publicly or in a password protected location. Or, if you want, you could have the digital images made into a physical photo book. More than that, you could even put them back into an environmentally safe album, without the chemicals or adhesives that marred the original album.

If your boxes are down in the basement or in the attic, get them out of there. You could get them scanned onto DVD and put one copy in a safe deposit box and one in your computer or online service. Then if you still want the physical photos, put them in Ziplocs and store them in a cool dry place that’s not subjected to too many temperature changes. A closet works. Keep in mind though, the best those photos will ever look is today. They will be subject to additional deterioration even if you seek to protect them.

That’s why scanning them to DVD is important. They will be improved and even rescued via the scan and they will be stored in a way where they will be safe. Every decade or so, you can make copies of the discs using the best technology of the time and they will easily last, without deterioration, for a half century or more.

Most of those smiling, happy older people in our photos are gone now. Sometimes the generations after ours won’t even know who they are. By digitizing them, labeling them and storing them, they will live on for generations. Think about that when someone takes your picture today. And don’t forget to kiss your old, sweet aunt.

A Simple Fundraising Concept Based on Photo Scanning

Let me tell you a little more about Scan-a-thon. I got an email asking me for a little more information about it and here's what I sent Perhaps I can answer a question you might have.

It's actually a simple fundraising concept. We know that virtually everybody has a collection of photos in their homes that represent important parts of their lives and are key to memories--photos taken prior to the digital camera age. Most are in boxes, or stored in albums and highlight some of the happiest moments and most important people in their lives.

Here is the problem. The photos are likely old and beginning to fade away. Some you can barely make out and others are not anywhere near the image quality they were when first printed. What's worse, many people put their photos in photo albums for organization or protection. What they don't realize is the chemical in the plastic of the albums will, in time, strip the photos contained in it of their color.

Take this a step further and realize that for a large percentage of people in the pre-digital age, many people in our precious photos can't be identified. Sadly, there may be no one left who can tell us who a person in the picture is.

The concern for someone's photos is capped off by the fact that they are susceptible to humidity (basement) damage, dryness (attic) damage, fire damage, water damage from leaking pipes or a flood and inadvertent loss. I wrote in this blog earlier in the year about someone who was re-doing their basement and thought a box of photos was part of the pile of trash that needed to go to the dumpster. That box was thrown out.

So...the reasons for scanning photos and slides are many.

On the fundraising side, the Scan Zone wants to participate. I'm a great believer in community and have been involved in philanthropy on many fronts for many years, including running the philanthropic arm of one of the largest companies in Rockland. Currently, I am the President of People to People, Rockland County's largest food pantry and have served on many other boards over the years.

Now the question is what can I do to help as many non-profits as I can. Any non-profit who does a Scan-a-thon will benefit from every donor who gets their photos done as part of the promotion. The Scan Zone will contribute 30% of any scanning project that's part of the promotion to the non-profit. With the most popular product being 1,000 photos scanned for $250, it can add up to a good amount of money for a charity.

If you wanted to do a Spring Scan-a-thon for a specific non-profit, here is how it might work:
• People could send their photos (via UPS or Fedex) to our office in Nyack, NY or from a central collection point if that is easier, we would do the scans, save and preserve on DVD, bill them and remit 30% of each payment to the non-profit.
• Or the non-profit could collect them in some other way, the Scan Zone would pick them up; we'd bill the organization the cost of the project less 30% and they could add on any value-added item and bill them on their own.

I believe a Scan-a-thon is effective because it allows an organization to touch its donors another time and by doing a project they were already thinking of doing--or even if they hadn't yet thought of doing it--they will be donating to your non-profit. What's better for them, the donation comes out of the Scan Zone side, not their side.

We use high speed scanners; we can color correct, organize them into folders, edit when necessary and output to DVD. The result will be that the improved image will be frozen in time and will last 50 years or more on the DVD-- with no degradation.

By some estimates, there are about 4 trillion paper prints and countless slides circulating around the world. If people had them scanned as part of Scan-a-thons, think about the money that could be raised for so many different kinds of important non-profits.

If you want to learn more about The Scan Zone, feel free to find us on Facebook or go to our website, which is www.thescanzone.com.

I look forward to the opportunity to work with more additional organizations for the benefit of all those helped by its fine work.

Using Photo Scanning to Fuel Support of Charities

There are a lot of things that are important these days. Obviously, we all have issues, concepts, organizations or activities that help shape the way we live our lives. When we become passionate about them, they spur us on to do more or accomplish more. That passion fuels our resolve and that resolve turns into performance---and hopefully, results.

There are many issues that do that for me, but two of those making the most noise in my personal ensemble are philanthropy and the restoration of our memories via scanning our photos.

One springs from the realization that there is so much need around us and to help meet that need, we, as individuals must get involved and help. Whether it’s a food pantry or a hospital, it is likely they wouldn’t be able to exist without the help of the community. That’s not politics, that’s just the reality of meeting need with limited resources. So we have to, in my humble opinion. jump in and help those organizations that we strongly support.

The other springs from the understanding that so much of our individual, personal histories exist via our photographs, slides and video that are fading further from view every day. Pictures fall victim to heat, humidity, chemicals in album plastic, misplacement, fire, flood or a host of other enemies. If we scan them, digitize them and preserve them onto DVD, they can last as they look today for 50 or more years. If we don’t, we run the risk of losing the significance of our images because we wont be able to identify the people nor will the photos be physically worth looking at.

My company, The Scan Zone, will address both issues together. We are unveiling The Scan Zone Scan-a-thon, which will work with non-profit organizations to create programs where donors get their photos scanned by The Scan Zone and about a third of the price of their scanning projects get donated to that non-profit.

It’s a big number to allocate to a non-profit and a pretty big number for the Scan Zone to absorb. But as I said, my two biggest passions right now are helping in the community to make people’s lives better and my desire to help people preserve their memories. The Scan Zone Scan-a-thon does both of those things for us and it is worth pushing the envelop on labor costs to scan, digitize, output to DVD and preserve memories while knowing important organizations that help people are receiving the financial benefit.

Don’t worry about us. There are lots of projects for the Scan Zone to make money outside the non-profit world. But to be able to have hit on a formula that preserves memories and financially benefits organizations that help people is truly a marriage of two passions.

Check out or face book page for more information and be sure to chec out our website at www.thescanzone.com.

Reasons for Scanning Go Far Beyond Preservation

There are real world reasons to have your photos scanned, digitized and protected. Many of those reasons are critical or emotional and can be necessary at a moment’s notice.

Up until now, we’ve dealt with reasons to scan your photos or transfer your videos that had a great deal to do with preserving the images themselves. You can’t have them in a basement—too humid. You can’t have them in an attic—too dry. You can’t even have them in photo albums—the polyvinyl chloride on the plastic is dangerous to your pictures, as it tends to suck up the colors. Add floods or fires to that mix and there is a very valid set of reasons to scan your photos and to do it soon.

Today, families are often scattered all over the country or even all over the world. By having your photos scanned, they can be uploaded to any number of commercial photo sharing sites for everyone to see. Whether it is a student far away, family members living in another state, relatives serving in the military or anyone in a location away from home, they can have access to those images that are meaningful to them.

Those photos can also be included in a montage, set to music and themed by an almost countless array of subjects. You can send people copies of a ready-for-television DVD or even upload it to YouTube.

But there are more reasons, some practical and some sad for having photos scanned. We are used to seeing wedding photos featuring happy, joyous people. But sometimes, those happy feelings don’t last and the marriage comes to an end. What happens to the photographs of themselves and their family? Often those photographs are the contentious subject of negotiations and wrangling. However, some couples just decide to have their photos scanned with each getting a copy of their photo collections. In fact, divorce ranks at or near the top of reasons why people have their photos scanned.

Certainly, the desire to use photos in a memorial service is a very real reason to scan them. It too, is one of the most often cited-reasons for scanning. It gives the family an opportunity to show images of their loved one in the kind of light they wish them to be seen in and remembered by. Similarly, people who have lost both parents want to share photos of their family with their siblings or other surviving relatives. Scanning, outputting on DVD and copying the DVD allow all family members to have their own copy of their parents’ collections.

We live in a culture where people are sharing images at an increasing and very rapid pace. But unless people have their photos scanned, they will not be able to share them online. Our Internet sharing capabilities may have taken off over the past decade, but our photographed history is more than a century old. By showing others your collection one at a time or in small groups, a small number of people in a small area can view your photos. By scanning them, digitizing them and sharing them online, you can show them to anyone who has a computer or a DVD player or even a phone for that matter.

Joe Allen

The Scan Zone

Your Photos Play a Pivotal Role in Your Family's History

The importance of having one’s photos scanned can be seen in many ways. In this blog, we’ve often discussed the great fear of losing your pictures to natural deterioration or worse, damage from fire or flood or some way other than normal.

People have told me sad stories of photos missing after construction in their basements or attics—not because water or dust impacted them, but because they were inadvertently loaded with other stuff in the dumpster outside the house and carted away as trash. One of the things I think about when I see news footage of a fire or a flood is that I hope the owners had their pictures somewhere else or were smart enough to have them scanned already.

Any new photos are likely to be in digital form already so they aren’t the problem. The issue is protecting the ones that are absolutely unique and nearing the end of their usefulness. We recently did a project for a customer who had taped row after row after row of tiny Polaroid pictures onto a sheet and had them labeled separately and taped to the photo. They were in a smoky plastic covering so we couldn’t scan them in the plastic. We took the taped pictures out and photographed it for reference. Then, one by one, we cut the photos out so we could scan them and had a photographic guide indicating which caption went with each photo. An arduous task for sure, but those kind of old, tiny black and whites are the ones I think are most important—they don’t have two or three duplicates and everyone in the room wasn’t taking the same pictures. They come from a time when relatively few had a camera so the pictures were largely one of a kind.

Those little pictures were scanned, improved and will now last for half a century or more on DVD and the family can make another collage of the same photos or even have prints of the improved-quality scans and put them together again. It’s great when you can actually see your grandmother’s parents, smiling as if it wasn’t the 1930s.

It’s equally, if not more important for occasions that aren’t so happy. A couple that divorced not long ago had years of photos taken of them and their three children. They were like many families—every signature moment was photographed. But the boxes where they were stored had to reside in one house or the other. Each one was reluctant to part with the photos that represented the moments they wished to keep.

So they decided to have the photos scanned. By doing so, they each received a DVD of their family collection and each could refer to their kids or their childhood memories and even to their divorced spouse. Their entire collection was duplicated—videos too. It turned out to be a good solution to a bad problem.

Scanning photos continues to play a pivotal role in preserving a family’s history. For good times and bad times alike, keeping your life’s imagery intact and preserved will one day be more meaningful than anything else you can touch.

Joe Allen
The Scan Zone

The World's Greatest Photos Could Have Been Lost

I was thinking recently about some of the most extraordinary photos I have seen through the years. Like everyone, I imagine I have seen hundreds of thousands of photos in my life and while the ones of my own family and friends stand out; there are those that represent significant moments in humankind. Some of them are so important, all you need to do to create a vision of them is use a few words to describe them.

The Marines putting the flag onto the ground at Iwo Jima is one such a photo. So is the Hindenburg on fire as it crashes to the ground. What about the street execution of the South Vietnamese man or the young girls running naked away from napalm?
Also included in that list has to be the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot or the remarkable photo of the woman and her two children in the California fields during the Depression. I would definitely include Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy looking on, still in the dress she wore all day

I can also think of the young woman on her knees wailing at her friend being shot at Kent State University, perhaps the Wright Brothers in their plane or Anne Frank looking up to her left and certainly the sailor kissing a nurse he didn’t know in Times Square celebrating the end of World War II.

Each of these photos are important points on the map of humanity. They reflect who and what we are and they are visual references of our passage through time. They’re important to all of us and certainly their imagery is treasured.

But besides all of them being cultural moments for us, they have another thing in common. Each of those photographs was shot on film and every single one of them ran the risk of being destroyed, or becoming hopelessly faded through time or discarded accidentally.

It took intervention on someone’s part to bring them to life. If they hadn’t been used in the magazines where we all saw them, what would have happened to them? What happened to the hundreds of thousands of others that weren’t included in magazines because they wouldn’t easily fit the space allotted to them or they weren’t what caught an editor’s eye? Sadly, I have to say, much of that collection of work is probably gone.

If each of those photos; the ones that made the magazine as well as the ones that didn’t, were scanned, digitized and saved to CD or DVD, we’d have all of them. Think of the treasured museum exhibits or online galleries we’d have.

Your photos are as treasured in your life as the photos mentioned above are to our common history. You can avoid the loss of those treasures by having them scanned. Once scanned, you can decide which of your photos sees the light of day and can be shared. If they aren’t scanned and, in fact, remain in a box in the basement, that choice one day may not be yours to make.

Joe Allen
The Scan Zone

Dont Let All those Pictures Scare You

It’s so easy to fall under the spell of disorganization.

Today was a snow day here in the Northeast. Actually, the first good one we’ve had in a while. So I decided to try and get to some things that I had started but never finished. I went down in my basement to get the next big box of family photos so I could scan them as part of my goal of having my family’s photos digitized and safe.

I’ve scanned about five large Rubbermaid-type boxes so far and there are three or four left so, no time like the present, I thought and went to have a look. I chose one, opened the lid, looked in and thought “I can’t deal with these pictures now.” They were a mess. None of them were packed in any way that made sense. It was a box of everyone’s (but mostly my own) laziness or lack of willingness to deal with.

I wanted to close the box and just leave them till the next time. Maybe I’d wait till the weekend. Or next month. Or perhaps even never. Maybe the comet will hit first or one of the photos will come to life and lead all the rest of the photos to freedom!

Anything to avoid dealing with them.

But I’m the business of scanning photos through The Scan Zone and I couldn’t act like that.

So got a bunch of Ziplocs, a magic marker, my iPod with the good earphones and made a comfortable place to sit. I started putting pictures in the most inclusive sets of subjects I could think of and went to work.

My childhood, my parents and brother, my grandparents and their contemporaries, my wife and kids and grandkid, extended family, friends, other people’s parties, vacations and the great equalizer--“miscellaneous.”

Just by doing that, I got through the box fast. In a short time, there were a series of neat, labeled bags. It didn’t matter how many photos there were because with a high-speed scanner, they could be dispatched quickly. They’d all be saved as digital files, which would be joined with other digital files I’ve made to build my family’s collection.

So here’s my advice: Go to where your pictures are with the Ziplocs and magic markers already in hand. This way, when you open the Rubbermaid or the box, you won’t be frightened by its contents’ disorganization but will instead have the antidote to the poison from the anarchy within. Get them in the bags, label them and put them back in the box. Now you’re organized and now you can get them scanned with a structure attached to them. And you won’t have to hope the comet comes in order to avoid dealing with them.

Joe Allen

The Scan Zone

The Day the Music Died is Also the Day the Visuals Died

I was sitting around today poking through music and realized it was the 51st anniversary of the day Buddy Holly died. He was lost in that terrible place crash after leaving a concert in Clear Lake Iowa. I was showing my 10-year-old grandson the musical themes that are interconnected, from Holly to the Beatles to Springsteen and beyond.

I explained to him how they called this day “The Day the Music Died.” But as were going through some of that history, I realized that it was the day the visuals died too. From that day on, there would be no more pictures of Buddy Holly taken and we’d have to do with the ones already circulating.

So we looked around a bit and I had a little trouble finding a high quality picture of Holly in a performance. The pictures were grainy, often out of focus, muddied and nearly unwatchable. The same went for the film and video transfers I could find. Compare them with the images of Springsteen or to a lesser extent the Beatles and they don’t hold up.

A big part of the reason is that what we were looking at on the screen were photo scans done long after Buddy Holly died and they were already in the midst of what I call “The Big Fade.” The originals might not have been stored safely and, after decades, were brought out and someone finally had the good sense to scan them. But they had already lost so much of their quality. To my grandson, the photos of this rock and roll pioneer were practically pre-historic.

Imagine, if you will, if that’s the quality of photos of a legend--because they weren’t scanned and preserved--what chance do the photos of ordinary people have of lasting? Well, the answer is, about the same—or worse.

If the technology was there to scan those photos not long after they were taken, preserving them at that moment with minimal loss of quality, he wouldn’t look so, well, historic. He’d look as vibrant and alive as the moment the photo was taken and he would be preserved that way for generations.

The fact that some pictures make it through the decades undamaged while others take an awful beating is reason enough to think about scanning your photos. I don’t want someone a generation or two behind me looking at pictures of John Lennon or my Aunt Pauline or my elementary school principal and thinking about them the same way I think of pictures of say, Woodrow Wilson.

If you have photos stored somewhere, consider digitizing them. They will be captured they way they are, with a minimal amount of degradation and can be output to DVD to be preserved for half a century or more.

When we lose someone, famous or anonymous, close to us or unknown to us, we lose the ability to photograph or videotape him or her. S o all we will have is what is already behind them. By keeping those images safe, they can last for generations or more. They will be immortalized for us as if it were the day they were taken and not as a footnote to our family history.

Joe Allen

The Scan Zone

Opportunities Abound for Sharing Your Photos

Today’s technology provides us with so many opportunities; it’s hard to decide which ones to take. Let’s just take the world of photos and concentrate on how to present those photos.

You can take your photos and do pretty much whatever you want with them. It’s now easy to present them in digitized scrapbooks, complete with calendars or hard covers. You can upload them to a seemingly endless number of photo sites and make them sharper, restore colors and crop them along the way. You can organize them and give the structure. If you’d like, you can even output certain photos and add music or even interviews to make a family documentary.

People upload their photos to social networking sites so their new friends or their families can see them the way they looked as children or introduce new people to their parents through pictures.

All of these creative presentations of one’s photographic history are interesting. Sure, we love our own photos more than anyone else does, but most everyone who views your digital scrapbook or slide show finds something they like or finds interesting.

But regardless of how you ultimately intend to use your old photos, unless you want to hand them to someone to look at, they are going to have to be scanned, digitized and output to a medium where you can view them. You’ve got boxes of those photos, but with most of the scanners that people have in their homes, it is an agonizingly slow process—so much so that people start and lose the will to go on or choose not do it at all.

But with photo scanning companies with high-speed scanners, it is cheaper than you probably thought to have all your pictures digitized and ready for you to use with the terrific technology-based presentations.

For example, for only about a quarter each, you can scan 1,000 pictures. That’s for photos that are scanned, physically viewed and enhanced if necessary. Lots of different companies can do it for you, but obviously, I would hope you’d give The Scan Zone a try.

Whatever company you choose, I urge you to start soon. Your photos and videos are not getting any younger and with every passing day they are a bit more at risk for fading or being lost or somehow destroyed.

I suggest going to where your photos are with a bunch of plastic bags and a black marker. Move your photos into organized piles with different themes like you would with old baseball cards. Then just put each pile in a bag (or bags) and put them in a different box marked “Ready for Scanning.” This will force you to go through them but without the angst of thinking you have a brutal scanning job in front of you.

Scan and digitize your media and you’ll trade an entire box, taking up space, for a single DVD. You’ll be able to take advantage of all the new technology that’s out there to show your photos. These are your memories. It’s our job to preserve them.

There is a Little Bit of "Us" in Every Photo We See

A friend of mine scanned some pictures of her early life and put them on Facebook. She made a few comments about them, describing what they were, where they were from and who was in them. From there, it was really fun to watch what happened.

Her photos were of her life from the time she was a young girl through her mid and late 20’s. I didn’t know anyone in any of the photos except for her but everyone seemed to look so familiar. From the way they looked, her friends could have been my friends and her family had the same look and feel of my parents, grandparents aunts and uncles. She had that youthful, 60’s and 70’s young girl-look that my friends had too.

Looking at her photos made me want to go and look at mine because if I could have fun with someone’s photos featuring people I didn’t know, how great it would be to spend time with people that made up my life.

I sure wasn’t alone in enjoying her pics. Her friends and family were commenting on Facebook, talking about how she looked, how the family looked and how they sure had a great time. Other people in her circle of friend and family started to put photos of their youth on in response and in a very short time it was a veritable festival of family photography.

All those pictures of everyone’s youth up there on Facebook have one thing in common. Every one of those old pictures first had to be scanned and digitized before they could be used on Facebook or anywhere on the internet. The photos were old, many were already faded and most would have benefitted from the minor corrections typically provided by a scanning company, like The Scan Zone. But as digital files, they will now last for the foreseeable future. And any of those people who scanned them in order to share them could burn them on DVD for storage and sharing and not worry about them for 50 years or more.

It was a heartwarming expression of the appreciation of life that I witnessed from my friend’s photos. And as I looked around, just on Facebook, others were doing the same thing and their friends were commenting and uploading photos. They were reminding the people close to them—and others who might not have even known them—what life in their youth was like.

The Scan Zone and dozens of other scanning companies can help people do that. I hope people get around to doing it before their memories are destroyed in a basement or due to a flood or lost in a move. We all make our memories—and they take a lifetime to collect. The sheer number of those photos make people shy away from undertaking the project of digitizing them. But it takes hours for a company with a high speed scanner to do it for you.

Once they’re scanned, you can put the best ones on Facebook and let others comment on how your hair looked, how thin Aunt Carolyn was and what was up with that shirt!

Who Is this Person in this Photo? Oh, it's Me!

What is it about seeing old photographs of ourselves that touches us in such different, remarkable ways? Why is it that we see an old photo in which we are included or featured in and right away we want to tell someone “Hey, look at this picture of me.”

Perhaps it’s part ego, perhaps it’s part reflection or perhaps it is our defense against accepting what we might have become now that all those years and life experiences have literally reshaped us. “See, there was a time where I was everything that I don’t seem to be right now.”

The past serves as a great ally as well as an unbeatable opponent. If you’re like me, you link to the past quite easily. I may have a great deal of trouble getting to a place 5 or 10 miles from my door, but I have no trouble getting to place called 1965 or 1973.

I scanned a set of pictures recently which included shots of me from 30 years ago. Of course I enjoyed seeing all the shots of that series because they included my family and friends and spending time with those pictures was the closest I’m ever going to get to spend time with those people again—at least in that way.

But I can’t explain the therapeutic value of seeing photographs I was in and being able to say “There is that guy that I remember being. There is that guy who discovered certain music or enjoyed certain people, live through this president and that or even went through all the rites of passage we seem to have to pass through to get from then to now—wherever now is.

Without a doubt I did what we all do…shook my head and asked where did the time go and promised to remove the baggage I’ve collected along the way so I could look more like that in contemporary photos. But the most remarkable thing was to be able to insert myself into the moments and the context of those photos. I was able to reintroduce myself to the person under the tree in one of those photos. He was 25, unmarried, no kids, no real job, no mortgage, no fears, no boundaries. I first wanted to tell that person “You can’t believe what you have ahead of you.” But I stopped and instead asked “What can you tell me about who I was when all this journey-through-life stuff was beginning.”

That was the therapeutic part.

Many of the photos I scanned that day were fading and were looking very much like the past. But once they were scanned, refreshed and made vibrant again, they offered even greater insight because I could actually see what was in the photos and who some of the other players caught in that instant of time actually were.

After scanning them, I logged them and saved them to DVD and made duplicates of them. But I couldn’t help stopping to look at whom I was with that day or what I might have been thinking or doing when someone interrupted my moment to “Look this way and smile.”

But after a long time doing the headshakes and making the “wow, did I look like that” comments to myself, I made the one final silent chuckle, stopped and called out to my daughter coming down the stairs, “come here, take a look at this picture and tell me who it is.”

There are many reasons to scan your old special family photos. You’ll protect them, give them new enduring life, put them on long-lasting media, share them among others in your family and so on. But one of the most important reasons is to see yourself again. Go back to the moment the photo was taken and touch that time in your life. You may reacquaint yourself with someone very important in your past…..you.

We Have Only a Limited Time to Feature the Matriarchs or Patriarchs on Video

One of the services we provide at The Scan Zone is producing “family documentaries” for our clients. We take hundreds of photos, some videos, music, write a script and actually produce it as a 30-minute documentary. A key component of the piece is an interview with the matriarch or patriarch of the family as well as any other family members who can talk about a family’s history.

I always suggest to people that they sit down with the older members of the family and get their perspective on what life was like in early days, how they came to this country and what they thought of the changes in America from then until now. It's mind-boggling to realize that this living testament to the continuity of family has seen so much and is sitting in front of you. Its one thing to read about those seeking a better life coming here or life during the Depression or living through World War II from books or other sources. But it's another to hear it from directly from your grandmother or uncle and know their stories are not only real, but ultimately lead to you.

However, there is one daunting universal truth: Your time with these special people, with all that experience, is finite. They won't be here forever.

Why is it important to videotape them? For several reasons. It puts these key family members on a long lasting DVD in an interview format talking about their lives. It locks in a family’s history from as far as the interviewees can remember straight through to the youngest members of the family right now. It gives context to a family’s story---and the pictures move and they sound like themselves.

Unfortunately, the best of plans don't always work out. Very dear friends of mine were considering doing a family documentary. In fact, we were already at the point of blocking the story and figuring out when to get these folks on tape. But a sad thing happened. The matriarch of the family slipped into an illness that resulted in her being placed in a nursing home with little chance that she will ever again be capable of participating in the documentary.

This is extremely sad. It makes me think of my own life. I have very little material on videotape from my father, mother or grandparents. Yeah, I have hundreds upon hundreds of photos, even some film, but next to no video. In fact, that gives me little, if any, examples of how my Mom or Dad talked. I’d love to let my kids embrace a grandpa they never met, but it will have to be done without voice or movement.

If you’re lucky enough to have people alive and vibrant who you can get on camera, think about doing that. We can even help you do it professionally. If you have videos they are in, please protect them and transfer them to DVD. If you have photos featuring them, scan them and keep them safe. Then you can begin to think about a family documentary that features them and the rest of your family.

Time is a fleeting enemy. Here today and gone tomorrow. That's particularly poignant when thinking about our older family members.