Screaming for the sky……
Well the office, my equipment room and projection room are “de-junkified”, 32 contractor bags full of junk; 35 slide trays, 2 tons of nylon and velcro sewn together into every imaginable kind of container, trust me I kept 300 lbs. of it anyway! A stack of old magazines, paper work 8 feet tall, and soon most of 35,000 color transparencies ( that’s slides to you newbies)! O.K., some light exaggeration, but I did throw away all those slide trays and a lot of containers and will dump most of my 41 years of slides after a few days of making sure I pull the few that are worth keeping of posterity, my posterity, no one else will care! Of course I will not throw away family images or anything that is historic, but most all the landscape and wildlife stuff will still hit the skids.
Why would you throw away what it took four decades to produce??!! Digital images have become so wonderful it is very hard to use the old 35mm slides and get any thing near equal quality. if you had a drum scanner and really knew what you were doing you could salvage some usable stuff, but the quality of current cameras, it’s hardly worth the trouble. The only stuff I will keep will be things I can never shoot again, or any kind of situations I may never see again, and truthfully they won’t last long.
I have loaded 8 boxes (some big) with everything Nikon I had, and it was a lot of stuff, some highly collectible, some practical, and some probably junk, but it will all go to Vinnie Colucci! Vinnie is the Nikon guy in our region and he has given his heart and soul to Nikon and he deserves this collection! Does this mean I hate Nikon or have turned my back on them? Not at all. For most of my life I have held a Nikon of one kind or another in my hands, and they served me well, very well! Somewhere along the trail I woke up and was an older man, shoulder surgeries and, well, age, and I had to go lighter! The X-System was a blessing and an answer to my prayers. So I can still shoot high quality, retro cameras, with fantastic image quality and superb lenses, with less than half the weight!
I can’t tell you how much better I feel with so much of the junk out of my life. Now it’s up to Photo Pro Expo to have great fellowship with some of my dear friends, and some great Graeter’s ice cream, and hopefully entertain the troops. I will be at the Fuji booth Saturday and hope to see some of you there!
Time to scream for the sky!
Blessings,
the pilgrim
This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2016 at 5:50 pm
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Bill, I am continuing to enjoy your blog every day! And, about your cleaning project – you are actually going to trash 35,000 or so slides? Even with the reduced quality, those images represent moments in time that will never happen again, each one a glimpse of God’s Majesty (and maybe some sports classics)! Before you trash them, you might want to consider buying a slide scanner and at least making digital images. And just consider this for comparison, those old vinyl records were once thought obsolete due to digital, but there is a big demand for those ‘antiques.’ So, 35,000 images made by a master photographer over 40 years definitely have lots of value!
God bless,
Mike
Mike,
Not to worry, here is my plan:
1. I will devote three 10 hour work days to sitting at the light table and reviewing the almost 15,000 slide pages.
2. I will divide them into three catagories, KEEP (family, once in a lifetime, very best, EX; America From 500 Feet), THINK ABOUT IT (stuff I’m on the fence about), NOT RELEVENT (not up to my standard, duplicates, stuff not worth scanning)
Here is why. When was the last time you went to a class or workshop and the instructor showed slide? Do you know almost no current magazine accepts transparencies for publishing.
John Shaw used to teach to compare your work every three years with what you shot 3 years prior, if your work is not significantly better your coasting backward down the hill. Honestly, images from 20 to 30 years ago seldom match what I’m shooting today.
So, no Mike, I will look carefully, but I will trash the insignificant and sub standard efforts!
Thanks for caring and you used great illustrations, wish I’d kept all those albums!