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.