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.