This page contains a single entry from the blog All I Know².
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Well, not really.
Actually, what happened is that I spent some time hacking my photo blog to add the year of the image as a category. So now you can go to the index page and see all the images taken on a certain year, starting with 1965. (Turns out there's only one such image so far.)
Putting this together, in fact putting the whole site together, is like watching my whole life pass before my eyes. Kinda.
I was a bit surprised to see that there is a big gap between 1993 and 1999. I have no images from those years on the site. I scrambled to figure out why. Did I make a mistake in my cataloging? But no, the reason is that around 1992 I switched from slides to print film. And the prints and negatives are scattered in boxes, uncataloged and out of order.
My 7000 or so slides from 1964-1989 are all neatly numbered and cataloged. But starting around 1989 you could no longer get slides mounted in cardboard frames. All the processors switched to plastic. And they chose a plastic that was hard to write on. I numbered all my old cardboard slides in ink. Ballpoint.
Like a 3-number IP address, I gave each slide three numbers separated by periods. For example, slide 2.15.17 would be found in case 2, section 15, and would be slide 17 in that section. Each slide box has 30 sections, and each section holds about 18 to 20 slides. 600 slides per case, and I have filled 12 cases. The cases were made by Airequipt, who also made slide projectors. I don't think they're around any more, but similar cases exist. Luckily I bought about 15 back in the 70's
Each numbered slide has an entry in a hand written journal that I started around 1971 when I couldn't stand having boxes and boxes of slides lying around.
It took many months but eventually I got all my slides up to that point sorted by date, numbered, and cataloged.
I used two bankers notebooks that I had bought in England. W.H.Smith A4 Narrow Feint lined "Counterbooks".
Each slide gets a line starting with the slide number, the approximate date, and some notation about the place or subject.
Unfortunately, I rarely recorded the camera details. So there's some confusion in the pre-1980 slides as to whether I was using a Nikkormat, Nikon FN, Nikon F, or F2.
Still, the system works. I could select the slides from the catalog, put them in a slide carousel for projection, dump them out when done, and put them all back where they belonged.
It worked, that is, until I started using print film. That happened when everyone in the family wanted prints and hated looking at slides projected on the wall.
Making prints from slides was expensive 30 years ago. Even so-called Cibachromes were still too expensive, and machine prints from slides were awful, and you never knew if you were going to get your slides back in one piece, or at all.
I never managed to create a system for negatives and prints. The great thing about slides is that you can see the image directly, and you can write on the cardboard frame. They are a complete database by themselves.
Negatives and prints go their separate ways, and without a contact sheet you can't really tell what a color negative is all about. And they are really hard to catalog.
I hate negatives.
Finally, when slide scanners and digital media became affordable and available, my slides were reborn, and with a working archival system.
I've resisted computerizing the catalog. Why? This works really well. When I scan a slide I give it a file name made up from the catalog number. 2.15.17.jpg
And, for the past two years I've been selecting individual images from the catalog, scanning them, and uploading them to the photo blog.
During the process, I flip thru the catalog, which, it turns out, has become a timeline into my life between 1965 and the last entry in 1988.
I can remember taking every picture. And the story around each image. There are images of people no longer alive. And children who are no longer children. Makes for some heavy reading, however cryptic.
One entry, 7.12.14 from 11/1978 says "family portrait with Nora, 12 hours old" and in big letters "NORA #1" - the first picture of many to come.
Of the 7000 or so pictures taken before 1999, most are family documentation, like most collections. But about 10%, or 700, stand on their own. I'm finding them, scanning them, and, along with new pictures, putting them on the photo blog for all to see.
And sometimes, it all just takes my breath away.
