Yesterday, I was watching the photos change and started thinking about all the ones I took with a film camera.
I found two containers filled with old photos and store envelopes with the negatives. I have more in the extra room, I hope the bugs didn't get to them. If they did, maybe the negatives there are still okay. There are pictures of kittens and this house and roadtrips that Brian took without me. Going through them is going to take a lot of time. And I'm pretty sure I've got more negatives than photos. So, how to deal with this?
I checked my scanner, it's an oldie, Epson Perfection 4990 Photo. I did some research online about scanning negatives and there were pictures, which included a negative holder. Huh?
I went over to Amazon and looked for such a thing. Wow! There is such a thing, but which one do I want? And then I found the online manual for my particular scanner, searched for "negative" and guess what? It has its own holders for negatives. And transparancies. Cool. Now, where did I put them? I'm pretty sure I didn't throw them out, I throw out nothing. It took me a while, but I finally found them. On the shelf that was about three feet away on the same desk that the scanner is on. Yay! I need to clean some of the interior glass on the scanner (I didn't even know this part was there, it's in the lid and I guess it works along with the main scanner or something). It looks like it will come apart pretty easily.
But yanno, putting those negatives in the holder, scanning them, and seeing which ones I want to keep, is going to take time. I headed over to Amazon and found some negative scanners, can you believe it? A couple even convert to an image. And I can sit here in the family room, won't be tethered to my desk in the office. So, I jumped on it. It should be here tomorrow. If the converted photos are poor quality, I can just scan the negatives with the scanner and take it from there. But I'll be able to choose which ones to work with!
As I dug through the boxes yesterday afternoon, I found photos I didn't even know I had. From a family reunion at Brian's folks. Pictures of his mom and his dad. This is going to be so fun.