Little Big Slides

A 1000+ 35mm slide scanning project completed this month had a surprise set of slide boxes containing 110 format slides. Introduced by Kodak in 1972, 110 is a miniaturized version of Kodak’s 126 film format used in pocket instamatic cameras. At half the size of 35mm slides, this film typically is grainy and lacks sharpness. Our scanner allows us to crop to any format manually. The scans we produced using a high resolution would allow the sample below to be printed as a 5 x 7 photo print. The client had not seen these images for 30+ years. The comment was; “These slides are a trip, We had so much fun sharing them with the old friends who appear in them”.

110 Slides on the lightbox

Actual scanned 40-year-old 110 slide image

Consolidating Your Digital Legacy

I spent the month of October working with a client on what at first seemed like a straight forward project of scanning all her photo prints from her past. Heather was downsizing her life and wanted to rid herself of a massive amount of clutter. On our first phone call, after she answered my ad on Craig’s List, she revealed that I could assist her in a wider goal. Not just her thousand plus prints could be scanned and in some cases restored, but her whole media past could be digitized, consolidated and presented back to her on a neat wallet sized hard drive and tucked into a safe place.

File structure of the completed project ready for handoff.

So the laundry list of things-to-do grew to include:

• 1000+ photo prints scanned and organized including repair of some dirty and damaged prints

• A mystery box of 35mm slides she had never seen that was passed down from her family

• Consolidate a box full of external hard drives accumulated over the years with backups of past work and personal data on to a single drive and erase, reformat the old drive for proper disposal

• Transfer family image discs and DVD’s to computer files and dispose of the discs ethically

• Video transfers - VHS, Hi8 and miniDV family videos over three decades

• Erase and sell/recycle two older laptop computers - see image below

• Digitized audio cassettes with family oral histories and performances

• Dispose/recycle all the above E-waste in a responsible manner including, old camcorders, discs, hard drives, video cassettes, etc.

Four weeks and 1200+ photos, 14 hard drives, 29 optical discs, 9 audio cassettes, 36 video tapes later the job was complete. Each folder organized to include a image of the original tape, hard drive or disc to easily identify where the original source of each file in her computer. The left over waste was separated into three categories. Reuse. recycle or shipped to an ethical e-waste center that would destroy any sensitive information on the tapes, discs and drives.

Now Heather can share the contents of a single hard drive with her son’s as a digital estate. No boxes of “stuff” for her heirs to sort through or just toss out. She is happy, her heirs are really happy and there is a lot less stuff in her material world.

“In my efforts to downsize and simplify, I realized that some of the most important things, the family videos and photos and recordings on cassette tapes, were completely inaccessible because of changing technology - and it took up lots of space and was not holding up to the passage of time. Gregory Fox did not flinch when I dropped off load after load of material to him. His technical expertise and professional background is par none. He went beyond my expectations digitizing everything, from fixing damaged photos and distorted audio. His kindly manner and patience in all interactions drove home how lucky I feel to not have shipped everything off to some company with no communication happening for this very personal project.

It feels like one of the best deals of my life for the price. I have the huge mental relief to know that no natural disaster or technical issue can wipe away this treasure trove. It will be an amazing holiday season this year when I pass along generations of lost memories to my family that Gregory has made easily accessible.”

Heather A.

Laptop erased, reformatted, and reset to factory settings before resale.

More Than Just Scanning

We are a digitizing service mainly in that we scan or digitize images, audio, video and documents. But we do so much more when clients get their creative juices flowing. Once photographs or other media are in the digital world anything is possible. Like the image below. We started with three small scratched and torn but beautiful early 20th century images supplied by the client. She wanted to combine these relatives into a single frame to tie them together. The tone of each photograph was different shades of sepia and black & white photography. We scanned and enlarged each image, restored the image a pristine look and tied them together by bringing the tone of each image into the same tint range. We combined the three images into a single file with a white background and printed them out on photographic paper at a size that fit an existing old frame. The client now has a showpiece rather than three small forgotten images in a shoe box. What treasures are waiting for you in your family’s photographic digital heritage?

A history of projects interrupted by the plague.

What do you do when you are stuck at home for more than a year? Scheme, scan, create, and plan for the return of more normal times. During the interruption in our lives I received many projects handed off carefully from masked people who were revealed to me in their photographs, slides and other materials we scanned during the pandemic. Here are a few of those life savers of isolation.

Scanning photographs-We scanned thousands of photographs both with our high-speed scanner and our flatbed scanner. Along the way we used photoshop to repair and enhance many of the oldest images.

Scanning slides-Eric L brought us 2000 slides which we hand scanned in less than a week. We also organized the disorganized images for him into folders before delivery. Just recently we purchased a bulk slide scanner that allows up to double our weekly output for even larger collections of slides.

Creating placemats-Earl M had memorabilia from his fathers classic diners in California stashed away in a oversized envelope for many years. We had done several projects for his wife Kathy and they came up with the idea that those menus, business cards and old photos would make a great theme for a family dinner. So we turned the individual images into collage placemats for their special event. See Earl’s comments on the gallery page.

Creating oversized prints for framing and hanging-several customers had standard prints they loved and wanted to enlarge them for framing. We digitized the prints using a high resolution during the process and sent them out for mounting on foam core board.

Flip books from digitized photos-One of the unique services we offer is turning old picture albums into computerized flip books. It’s nice to keep the albums physical features intact as a virtual album clients can share with anyone right in any web browser. This works great for scrap books as well.

One of the most unique projects we tackled was from a retired U.S. Ambassador to several African nations. She asked if we could digitized her personal letters from abroad over many decades for donation to a college along with her collection of African art. We took many extra hours to organized the boxes full of correspondence chronologically before we even warmed up the scanner. We delivered digital files organized by year and month in PDF form. We even recreated a few letters that had faded or were damaged over the decades and did not scan well.

Over the past 24 months we produced and delivered digital audio recordings from seventy-year-old LP’s, captured video from old video tape formats including Hi8, VHS and VHSc, solved mysteries of unknown 8mm film from the 1940’s and assisted several clients with Apple computer support and training..

We look forward to seeing your images and other media in healthier days ahead and with a little luck maybe no mask. :^)

Note From the Grumpy Tech Guy

Photographs were meant to be flat. Rubber bands can permanently cause your precious one-of-a-kind prints to bow or even crease. Handle with care. Deliver your photos to us free of rubber bands, staples (OMG), paper clips, scotch tape and sticky notes. The machinery doesn't like these extras and may be damaged.

Another lesson we have learned through past projects: sticky or damaged pictures should be put in their own envelope, ziplock bag or hazmat suit. This will warn us to scan these photos manually. 

If your photos were ordered as double prints, please only send us one set of prints. This will save us time and you some money.  Also, try not to package too many pictures in the same box or envelope. A good rule of thumb is groups of thirty or less per envelope.

If a photo is dirty, damaged or torn, handle with care and individually submit these in their own sleeve with written instruction if there is a need for that. Don't bury special needs among the masses.

If you can, submit horizontally shot prints separately from vertically shot prints.

And finally, we are all guilty at times of taking bad pictures (blurry, under and overexposed, heads cut off). Try and remove any of those mistakes before submitting your bulk order. You will save a few bucks and space on your computer with your new batch of digitized treasures.

Oh, I feel less grumpy now. Thanks.

Introduction

In this blog we hope to add interesting takes on family trees, photo archiving and recommendations for tools and apps that may help you get the most out of your scanned computer photo files...