Over the past few years I’ve been slowly working through an inventory of some thousands of 35mm slides taken by my Dad and others in the pre-digital era. I used to run a “Friday Slide Scan”. It fell off a bit because I neglected to scan for months at a time, and because the sequence I was working through was all adorable babies and cute toddlers; of limited interest. Well, it’s not Friday, and these are that kind of picture. But still.
Tim, Allen, Bill, Orvil. Ryley, Alberta; 1957.
Bill is my Dad, Allen his brother, Orvil their father. Don’t they look sharp?
Tim flies a kite with his mother Jean helping. Corvallis, Oregon, 1958.
Isn’t my Mom’s hair great?
Both my mother and father are of course much younger than I am now.
Images in the Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1953 and 2003 by (in rough chronological order) Bill Bray, Jean Bray, Tim Bray, Cath Bray, and Lauren Wood; when I know exactly who took one, I’ll say; in this case, Jean and Bill Bray, respectively. Most but not all of the slides were on Kodachrome; they were digitized using a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED scanner and cleaned up by a combination of the Nikon scanning software, Photoshop Elements, and Adobe Lightroom.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: alessio (Jan 27 2008, at 07:51)
Wow, those pictures look beautiful.
Of course they will mean a great deal more to you but even for us they are interesting for their crisp colors and the sense of "Americana" they convey (whatever that means, and even if it will make you bulk at the notion) :-)
Thanks for sharing them.
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From: Charles (Jan 27 2008, at 08:15)
Digital is fine, but nothing is better than Kodachrome 64 pushed to 80. Also how many people today are going to have there digital images available for their children or grandchildren to go through.
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From: John Cowan (Jan 27 2008, at 08:42)
Man, that do must have taken *hours*.
I'm more familiar with Corvallis as a fictional place (in S.M. Stirling's books) than a real one: it's just great when the guy pompously intones "By order of the Faculty Senate and the People of Corvallis," yada yada. But in any case it's the only thing really American about all this.
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From: Norman Walsh (Jan 27 2008, at 16:12)
Any idea what the background building is? I lived in Corvallis in, uh, '77 and '78, I think.
Ah, nostalgia.
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From: Bob DuCharme (Jan 27 2008, at 17:17)
Regarding the first one, I was going to say "amazing picture, Tim!" Oh wait, Tim's the kid. "Amazing picture, Jean!"
For us non-pros, great lighting is usually a happy accident, but great timing and composition aren't necessarily. This picture scores very high on all three counts.
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