Scanning Photos and Negatives

Do you have negatives or photos that you say you will have reprinted or scanned "some day"? I have for over 25 years.

When I picked up my Honeymoon photos, I wanted to keep them in order so I wrote a number on the back of them. This was before I knew to use a photo safe pencil/pen. As I stacked them, the ink from the pen made a mark on the next photo.

If the ink marks are in the sky, they can be cropped out, but if they're in a main part of the photo like in the wave below or in someone's face, it's more of a problem.

Since then, I have wanted to get reprints of the photos and make a honeymoon photo album but I never did. As I have quoted before, "something that can be done at any time is often done at no time".

For years, I had "lost" the negatives. I couldn't find them in the box of negatives I had at my house. When we were visiting my in-laws, I recognized a box in the closet and remembered that I had stored my first box of negatives there.

It's a tip I had heard, to keep your photos and negatives in a separate place. It's equivalent to the reason we back up our photos today. Ideally, your back-up drive should be in another location or on the cloud. If anything happens to the originals in your home, you always have your back-ups.

When I started my Revive55 Project last summer, reprinting these photos and making a photo album was one of the things I wanted to get accomplished. Our anniversary is this month, and this was my plan but with non-essential businesses closed, I can't take in my negatives to be reprinted.

That's not a big problem because I also wanted to digitize the photos. I wasn't sure whether I would get the photo lab to digitize them or if I would do it myself. Years ago, we bought a scanner - maybe it was purchased at the same time as the Elgato Video Capture we bought for our 20th anniversary. Click here to read my post about digitizing home videos.

I have used the scanner to preserve photos and negatives in the past but never got to my honeymoon negatives.

I got the scanner out this week and was disheartened to see that it was no longer compatible with the updated OS on my Mac. Our older iMac was updated as well. I started searching for a new scanner. I consoled myself with the thought that maybe a new one will be more efficient and better quality.

This is what my scanner looks like. The first photo shows the negative film holder installed in the lid of the scanner. The lid closes and the negative gets scanned. The second photo shows the white cover that is used to cover the black holder when you want to scan photos or documents.

The third photo shows the other side of the negative film holder where you load the negative as can be seen in the fourth photo. You lift the top that holds the negative down when closed.

                          

It's not the simplest process which is why I thought that over the years, something better would be on the market.

The reviews did not reassure me. I found the negative holder awkward on my scanner but the new ones were labelled as flimsy. The better quality scanners were over $1200. I was almost convinced to purchase a medium priced one for $275 that I had read and heard was a great scanner since starting my Revive55 Project. I felt though, that it was wasted money because I didn't think it would be any better than the one I already had. Bummer.

I then found online software that we could buy that would make it work again. It was a cheaper solution but was it a trustworthy solution?

When I was quarantined in April, I had tried to use my old MacBook (circa 2008) but couldn't get it to work. I used a refurbished Linus laptop instead. My scanner wasn't compatible with the laptop so I got the MacBook out again and got it to work.

I downloaded the scanner software, and it WORKED!!! I was SO happy and relieved. I'm so happy that we still had it. We hadn't used the MacBook in years and when it was in the process of crashing, I managed to export the valuable photos, music and documents from it before it completely crashed and we needed to wipe it.

I was happy to scan the negatives. Some of the printed photos are markedly improved just by scanning the negative. Going back to that first photo I showed with the ink marks:

Original photo printed (1990's)

Scanned from negative film (2020)

Scanned from negative film (2020)
edited to straighten the horizon line, correct yellowish tinge
and lighten shadows possibly due to age of negative

By scanning the negative, the sun is visible and there are parts of the photo that was cropped on the initial photo. In this case, seeing the extra chair doesn't add value but sometimes a critical part is missing. The negative is not 4x6 so when a photo is printed, it cuts off part of the photo. If you have printed photos online, you will see this when you choose whether you want to crop a little on either side or more on one side.

As technology changes, I am being reminded that we should preserve things while we still can. I had old negatives from a disc camera that became obsolete. I'm not sure if I kept them or not, but I googled and learned that I may be able to scan them with my scanner.

I will now scan as many negatives and photos as I can before technology changes again and I'll have to spend more or lose my memories preserved in these images.

Reviving Home Video (and Audio)

For our 20th wedding anniversary, almost a decade ago, I wanted to preserve our memories so rather than regular gifts or a trip to celebrate, we purchased an iMac to optimize our photo editing and organization with Photoshop and purchased Elgato Video Capture to transfer our home videos.

This post is about Video Capture. We purchased the Elgato one, but there are other brands available that do the same thing. Video Capture allows you to connect a camcorder, VCR, DVD player or other analog video or audio sources to your computer.

You can preserve your home videos by connecting your camcorder to your computer. You press play on the camcorder and capture the video on your computer. With the video digitized, you can also edit it to save the best parts in a shorter highlights video.

Tip: If your camcorder or analog video source has an S video output, it will give better quality result than the yellow video output. The red and white outputs are for audio.

I would advise to still keep the original cassettes (and cameras) in case technology changes and improves in the next decade(s). Perhaps in the future, there will be technology to improve the quality of old film. Looking back, our home videos were first transferred to videocassettes that were of okay quality. To get better quality, we then transferred them to DVD. We can now transfer them digitally. How long will we have DVD players for? Who knows what future technology will be available?

We used to save VCR cassettes of shows we recorded or VHS movies we purchased. We can't imagine watching those anymore. Many of those films or television shows can be streamed or purchased at higher quality now. We're happy we can digitize from our original camera cassettes and not the VCR tapes or DVDs we made that may be lower quality than the originals.

In some cases, lower quality is better than nothing so there are times that I digitized a VHS tape or DVD with Video Capture. Before donating your VCR or allowing it to break, it's a good idea to transfer them if you want to do it yourself.

There are companies who provide this service if you don't want to take the time to do it yourself.

Although my home videos were digitized years ago, I recently took my Video Capture out to record songs I wrote. 

My digital piano has audio outputs so I connected it with Video Capture to my computer. It's a bit of a cheat because there's no video output. The file I get is a greyed out video with the piano audio. I edited the file in iMovie to remove the video and only keep the audio. I can then upload the audio MP3 to my music collection to listen to them.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo

May 5th is Cinco de Mayo in Mexico. My parents spend their winters in a small town on the west coast of Mexico. The first time I visited, I ordered a shrimp cocktail from the menu and was surprised when it came in a cold tomato based broth. It was delicious. Every time I go back, I order it and it's just as good as the first time.

It's the perfect dish for me to make when I want to reminisce about my time in Mexico.

 

My breakfast on Cinco de Mayo is a tribute to two coffee shops I like in the small town.

I would have a caramel latte at the shop we went to the most. At the other, I had fresh honey with toasted homemade bread that was amazing! I didn't think I liked honey until that day. to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, I made a caramel latte using Nespresso's Mexico coffee served with toasted fresh bread and honey.

For afternoon snack, I was reminded of our time at Mexico City airport where we would have a layover. On our way there, we saw people carrying boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We walked all over the airport trying to find the shop but couldn't find it. We didn't have that much time so I promised my daughter that we would find it on our way home when our layover was a little longer.

That day, we asked at the information desk and we were told that we had to go out of the security area for the shop. I wasn't going to let that stop me, so I went out to find it. I thought that I spoke enough Spanish to order a dozen regular doughnuts but the worker could not understand what I wanted. It was a reminder that I should really improve my Spanish in the future.

 

Going back through security with only my purse and doughnuts, I wondered if this was a regular sight for the security agents. My daughter was thrilled. We enjoyed a couple and had some interesting looks and comments when we boarded the plane with the box in the bag. 

We didn't know it at the time, but it turns out that there are still a few Krispy Kreme doughnut shops left in Toronto. I thought they had all closed.

Every once in a while we get doughnuts (or my daughter receives some as a gift). I was happy that we had some in the freezer to enjoy and reminisce about that day in Mexico.

We enjoyed looking at our photos and videos from our trips to Mexico.

Like I wrote in my last blog post when I celebrated Lei Day, if you haven't curated photos or videos from past trips, this is a great way to use a deadline to get them done. You can use a national holiday date, use the date when you went or even better, choose now to get started.

Celebrating Lei Day

Following up on my previous post about celebrating trip memories, Wearing my Hawaiian dress, I made Hawaiian themed foods to celebrate Lei Day.

I was ordering groceries every two weeks at that time so without early planning, the celebration would have to be done with foods I already had in our house.

We started the day like we did at the resort with fresh berries and watermelon.

I also ordered Hawaiian pizza a few days before (not thinking about Lei Day) and froze leftovers so although it's not a Hawaiian dish, I enjoyed it for lunch.

    

Without ingredients to make a mai tai, I made a fruit punch like I had from a food truck in Hanalei.

While in Hawaii, we had a lot of fish and seafood. In the freezer, I had lobster meat and shrimp so I made a lobster cheese dip for an appetizer and lobster & shrimp on baguette for dinner.

                        

                     

My husband and I used this deadline to curate the photos and videos from our trip. My husband made a highlight video using Final Cut Pro and we enjoyed reminiscing while watching it.

If you haven't curated photos or videos from past trips, this is a great way to use a deadline to get them done. You can use a national holiday date or use the date when you went or even better, choose now to get started.

My Photo Album Collection

Counting down to the end of My Revive55 Project is helping me accomplish more. I think the following quote by Gretchen Rubin is very relevant to memory projects: "something that can be done at any time is often done at no time".

Do you think that you'll organize your photos some day? That you'll document your stories? That you'll organize or declutter your mementos? I wanted to stop procrastinating which is why I started my Revive55 Project. By having a deadline and sharing my progress, I am accomplishing a lot but I still don't think I can do everything I wanted to do without spending every waking moment on the project. 

I think that is also a very valid point to recognize. I will not do everything I wanted to do.

In recognizing that, I have to prioritize. What adds the most value? What do I love the most? What shortcuts can be taken? How will I do this in the future so that I don't fall behind again?

These are some of the questions I am hoping to answer before my project ends.

How will I preserve and enjoy my photos in the future? Here's what my collection looks like at the moment and how I got to this point.

This isn't all my albums. I actually have three of each colour on the bottom shelf completed. The bottom shelf are my Creative Memories albums and average 30 pages per album. The Blurb photobooks are on the right side of the top shelf with the year on the spine. Each of those books average 220 pages. One of my concerns that prompted me to start photobooks was the amount of space the albums would require with the increase amount of digital photos. One photo book is equivalent in shelf space to 6-7 Creative Memories albums.

When I started to scrapbook with Creative Memories, my first child was 10 months old. Starting my albums at his birth was a great starting point. Scrapbooking was my hobby and I made time for it. During the time of film photography, we didn't have as many photos to put in albums. It wasn't too difficult to keep up if it was something that we enjoyed.

Before starting to scrapbook, most of my photos were already in regular photo albums. Learning that those albums were damaging my photos, I started to transfer them to photo-safe Creative Memories albums.

I stopped scrapbooking my chronological family albums in 2008 when my passion and hobby became blogging. I didn't actually mean to stop, I just kept procrastinating and saying I'd catch up some day. As the days passed, the task became more and more overwhelming so I procrastinated more.

When I started my Revive55 Project last year, I had photos in albums from my birth to before my wedding. Because I wanted to make "special" albums for my wedding, showers and honeymoon, I procrastinated doing them. I purchased the albums and they've been sitting there empty.

I wanted them to be perfect and I suffered from perfection paralysis. I skipped those and had my photos from after the honeymoon in albums up to a few years before we had our first child. I never completely got caught up to my son's birth.

When I started to focus on my photos again a couple of years ago, I completed four photobooks for the years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014.

So my gaps were for a few weeks around my wedding and honeymoon, 3 years before my son's birth, part of 2008, 2009, 2013 and 2015 to present. I also have to admit that I have a few gaps in my completed albums as well, like my sister's wedding that I had perfection paralysis and was overwhelmed with the number of photos. It wasn't my wedding, but I had enough photos to fill an album. How many pages do I allocate to her wedding? Which photos do I omit?

I also have extra photos over the years that I would love to add. In my first scrapbook, I included two pages for our trip to England. Two pages!! How does a trip only have two pages? The previous two pages were a business reward trip to St. Thomas. The cost of the album was limiting what I put in that first album. 

I can't add pages to that album without it affecting all the albums that come afterwards. If I add pages, I have to remove the last ones and add those to the next album and it creates a cycle of adding and removing.

What I hope to do with the extra photos is to include them in an England album of trips over the years. I could also do a Caribbean album of our various tropical holidays. Those are someday projects. 

I am currently focusing on closing the gaps in the chronological albums.  I'm very happy to have completed 2008 in my photo albums this week.  I also recently finished my 2013 photobook.

When I was making photobooks for my siblings when they turned a special age, they shared their childhood photos with me. Many of them I didn't have because our Mom would share the photos between us and not have four copies printed. Since starting my Revive55 Project,  I added the new-found photos to my childhood album and in so doing, expanded from one album to three. I also added mementos like report cards, ribbons, certificates and newspaper clippings. My first album is from birth until Grade 8 and my second is my high school years. The third is my university days. I am so happy that I managed to get that done during my Revive55 project.

My next focus is to print my 2009 photos and put them in Creative Memories albums. With my anniversary in May, I will focus on my wedding and honeymoon photos during that month. I will then continue chronologically to finish our photos before we had children.

Once this is done, I will consider my photos preserved from my birth until 2014. Creative Memories albums from my birth to 2009 and Blurb photo books from 2010 to 2014.

I then need to decide what to do from 2015 to 2019. Is it realistic to get caught up with those before the end of the project?

I don't want to keep falling behind and with the number of photos I'm adding to my collection, I need to find a new way of preserving and enjoying my photos. 

At the moment, I am thinking of continuing to make chronological photobooks but also having specialty albums (scrapbooks) or photobooks for trips and special themes. My husband has begun to make videos that include video clips, photos and journaling. He also makes digital albums that we watch on our TV either my mirroring our computer screen or through Apple TV.

I just wanted to write an update now as I am getting closer to closing the gaps in my photo projects. By reviewing and writing updates, I sometimes get aha moments when I get new ideas so hopefully something will click to help with my photo collection.

Capture Memories with Homework for Life

Everyday, we are creating special memories; even during this pandemic.

Matthew Dicks has had an unbelievable life. Crazy things have happened to him, so much so that his friends encouraged him to go on stage to compete in a storytelling contest. He has since won the Moth StorySLAM competition 45 times and is 6-time GrandSLAM champion.

What he found was that those crazy stories weren't his best stories. The stories that people love to hear are the little stories of everyday life. They are the stories that people can relate to. When he realized this, he wanted to find more small stories that exist in his life to remember and share.

He created "Homework for Life". He writes a sentence or two every day of something story-like that happened. He found that his project turned into magic as his "storytelling lens" sharpened and got refined.

He says that by taking 5 minutes at the end of your day to capture it,  Homework for Life helps you notice that your days aren't always the same and meaningless.

He found that life slowed down and time doesn't fly for him anymore.

Here is the Ted Talk where he presented Homework for Life. I highly encourage you to watch it. I have watched it multiple times since I first found it. I purposely omitted great parts of the video in my blog post.



I was trying to remember where I learned of Matthew Dicks. I thought it was from Marie Masse but couldn't remember exactly from what. I get lots of inspiration from Marie by email, from a course I'm taking with her and her podcast.

I started a Homework for Life spreadsheet at the beginning of January. I haven't gotten into the habit of reflecting at the end of the day but I have written down stories for most days by looking at my calendar and photos as reminders. I'm just looking back at my list now and because I have been writing down memories, I see that I first watched the video on January 9th after learning about Matthew Dicks from Marie's 71st episode of her podcast: Intentional Documentary. She has taken a break from her podcast this year, but I highly recommend listening to her podcast from the start if you're interested in photography and storytelling.

Just looking back at my spreadsheet, I can see stories that I'm happy I captured because I had already forgotten some of them.

Celebrating Trip Memories

Yesterday was St. George's Day, England's National Day. My husband is English so we sometimes do something special to recognize it.

I planned to make fish and chips, but then upon request changed it to jacket potatoes as the English call it (baked potatoes). I was happy that my daughter was home because she thought of making scones with cream and jam to serve with tea in the afternoon. How perfect.

I love that she's wearing a sweatshirt she bought on our last trip to England. We also used our England cups and sugar bowl I bought at Harrods in London. The sugar bowl and cup and saucer were purchased in 2018 while I bought the "Harrods Knightsbridge" cup on my first trip to England in 1992.

My daughter thought to post the event on social media, even if I didn't.

I was reminded of St. George's Day yesterday morning when I checked my TimeHop app and saw my Facebook post from 10 years ago.

This made me think of other national days I could celebrate to be reminded of travel memories. I could use the National Day or the date I travelled to prepare a special meal or go to a restaurant/pub that serves food from that place.

Here are some example that I could choose from:

• Australia Day - January 26
• St. Patrick's Day - Ireland - March 17
• St. George's Day - England - April 23
• Cinco de Mayo (Mexico) - May 5 or Grito de Dolores - Sept. 16
• Saint-Jean-Baptiste - Quebec - June 24 
• Canada Day - July 1
• United States Independence Day - July 4
• Bastille Day - France - July 14
• Switzerland National Day - August 1
• Barbados Independence Day - November 30

Here's a list of national days by country if you like the idea and want to celebrate your past trips or even dream of places you want to visit in the future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_day

An easy way to remember the travel dates is to look in our passports. Click here to read my blog post about the passport journal I created. I added the holiday dates and travel dates to my calendar with a reminder a week before to plan the celebration if I want.

I made a small 7x7 photo book with photos from my phone of our last trip to England.

It only took a couple of hours. I chose 80 photos (maximum for the company I was ordering from). It's one photo per page and we can add a line of text per page.

I didn't think to look at it yesterday, but I did this morning.  These types of travel books or digital books could be added to the festivities by reminiscing and rembering the stories of our trips.

Having a date to celebrate, can also give a deadline to complete a photobook or digital album of our best trip photos that are lost in the clutter of our digital files.