Spots of mildew touched the half dozen trays of slides that sat unopened for decades. Months ago the slides came to our house with a request that we scan the photos into digital format. My husband brought them to our house and left them sitting on the desk unopened and un-viewed for several more months until I reminded him we would be seeing their owners again soon.
He opened the boxes and discovered the mold had destroyed some. Others had faded with time. Still, enough slides remained to convert to digital and portray the family history of that era.
With the conversion deadline met, I set another deadline to make yet another printed photo album with the best of the slides.
As I began to work on the photo book, I reflected back to the first photo album I made using the hundreds of pictures my mom had taken of her five children with her Hawkeye Brownie camera. It was a simple, box camera with one button to push and no options for focusing, zooming or printing anything larger than a three-inch square photo and one option in film: black and white. When color film hit the market, she happily quit buying black and white film and never looked back.
Sometimes the closest drug store processed her film into prints. Sometimes she mailed it off to a studio that promised her a free roll of film with each roll they developed. Others promised double prints and we received the usual three-inch square photo and another about one-fourth that size.
Those duplicates were small – even smaller than the original Polaroid instant pictures that my friend took on his new camera in the late 1960s. We leaned over his shoulder to watch the picture appear on the heavy photographic paper. Smearing the fixer on the film yielded wallet-sized streaky, black and white pictures that had no negatives to make duplicates.
Creating that first photo album for my mother took hours of gluing photo corners on cream colored pages in a huge family album. It was time well spent. When the family gathered for Christmas, everyone sat down and slowly turned the pages to see the family story unfold.
In the evening, we moaned and mocked our way though a reel or two of the silent movies taken on our home movie camera. Someone always wanted to stop the action in mid-jump, but we only paused the film briefly. We had learned the hard way that long exposure to the heat from the projector’s lamp would melt the frame right before our eyes.
From a mom who took pictures at every family gathering, I married a man who liked his single lens reflex 35 mm camera for taking slide pictures. Slides provided the cost savings solution for all the scenic views he snapped. We converted a few good slides to print, but not often. Eventually, we accumulated hundreds of slides and a couple of projectors.
I preferred print film and often snapped candid shots at the tail end of a roll of slide film so that I could switch to print film. And then I ordered double prints in the same size, so I could mail the photos to my mother and other family members. For major family events, I purchased disposable cameras to insure lots of photos and opted for triple or even quadruple prints so everyone could see the pictures.
That was then, this is now. Photography has changed.
Today, we enjoy instant feedback with just a glance at the back side of the digital camera. If I like it, I keep it. If I don’t, I delete and take another one or two or several more. If I want someone else to see the picture, I can email it or share it from my on-line website within the hour.
My parents received a movie camera when we were teens. In the late 1980s my husband won a video camcorder about the time all our children were leaving home and we had our first grandchildren. When my son’s youngest wondered why she was not in one of the videos, her parents bought a movie camera about a fourth the size of our camcorder and captured her in motion.
Now anyone with hand held smart phone can make a video with sounds … and the picture won’t melt when it is stopped to study one image more closely.
But digital photography or video, the problem remains the same as it did with all those slides. The pictures usually sit in the box, on the website or on the camera until someone takes the time to have them printed.
And that’s where I am taken back to my senior year of high school.
I may not be gluing photo corners in place, but I do spend a lot of time poring over a digital page, working to arrange all the pictures just right before I send off a digital command to a distant printer to publish another photo book and hope spots of mildew do not ever find it.