Project

I decided during my stay at my parents house this summer that it would be a nice little project to scan all their old photos (or most of them anyway). Mostly it was so that I could get some photos of me when I was Tage's age for comparison, but why not do them all I thought. So I told my dad to bring them to me and now I have 25 cartridges with 40 slides each ( = 1000 slides) to process in my bookshelf. Scanning takes about a minute each so that could be done within 16.7 hours (if I really streamlined the operation) but that does not take into account the time it takes to remove dust, change frames on some of them etc etc etc. Then there is the post-production, cropping, making changes to the exposure, digitally remove some dust etc etc. But that is all fine, it is just manual labour and yes, it takes time and is kind of repetitive but I sort of like that.

What I do have a problem with however is sorting. I am kind of meticulous when it comes to my photos. I have them nicely sorted in the order in which they were shot. I like the time-line, that they form a record of events. It probably has to do with my poor memory. To have your photos sorted like that is of course not ideal. For one thing, it makes it impossible to put them into an album (if you don't put all of them in there), and you can't sort all your photos of your dog in one place (cause then you disturb the time-line), and you can't really show your photos to someone (because then you must show all of them)... (all of this applies to the analog photos of course, the digital ones is far easier to handle (I highly recommend using a photo managing/editing software like Lightroom, Aperture, blueMarine or picasa to keep your photos organized)). But as you might have guessed, the gene that makes you inclined to keep anal order among your photos must have skipped a generation. Photos of the X-mas 1981 pops up in numerous cartridges. Winter is mixed with summer, spring and autumn. A young version of my mother pops up in the middle of a moose hunt in 1985. Dogs that did not exist at the same time seems to be playing together. These cartridges must be my fathers version of Monica's closet. I feel that I must bring order to this chaos but I do not know how.