I started the process of digitizing my 600 picture slides. If I go for the cheapest way to have them digitized, it costs me € 0.40 per slide. No, they are not worth € 240! And besides that, the quality might not be much better than the quality I get with my method.
It’s not a good picture, because I took it with my (coal fired) mobile phone. But it gives you the basic idea of how I digitize my picture slides
So what do I do? Well, I project the picture slides on the wall (all the walls in my house are white and flat), and take a picture of it with my digital camera, which is standing on the projector. I use the camera’s zoom to get it almost full screen. And I use the timer to actually take the picture. My Camera Raw program just treats these pictures as normal, I only have to crop them. The result is good enough for me. Quality is not an issue, it’s what’s ON the picture that’s important. Twenty years of my life, with all the hair styles, clothes (Oh, I remember that dress. How I liked it!), places I visited, cars I had. The slides are memory triggers, or some sort of time machine. Instantly you fill in all the details, how warm it was, the smell, the sounds, the subject of the conversation you had. It’s not important to clearly see the registration of my blue metallic Golf from 1980, parked somewhat in the distance. I know it is GK-26-GD! I even found a nice picture of a lock. I don’t think anybody will recognize this place. And we can’t get there with our boat. It’s in Sweden, in the Göta canal.
Göta Canal (Sweden)
I must admit, there are also some pictures that absolutely don’t ring any bells whatsoever. I recognize myself, but that’s about it…
The only problem is: I can’t take these pictures at daytime. I have to wait until it is dark at night, or, since I have been busy over the last two nights, do it at 5:30 in the morning. It’s a slow process, but taking pictures early in the morning for about an hour gives me just the right amount of pictures to process afterwards.
And from today on I can also do it at night. Yesterday it was my tv night (I always watch a German scientific program on the Tuesday) and Monday night I went to a meeting of the local stamp collectors. To see if they could give me advise about what to do with my stamp collection. The answer? Sell it. Well, part of it; some of the stamps absolutely have no value. They gave me an address of a shop in Ede. So that’s where I went yesterday morning. And I sold the stamps. Don’t assume I got a lot of money for it. No, there are not a lot of people interested in collecting stamps anymore. So I got a staggering € 42 for it. Which definitely is a lot less than I paid to get them. But it’s another € 42 towards a Houdini hatch WITH fly screen and black-out blind…!