Eleanor and I inherited a lot of old slides after my grandfather died a few years ago. I had them stored up in the closet of my old room in my mom’s house. When I was back home for Christmas, I made a project of de-bulking them as they were taking up lots of space.
I looked through many hundreds of slides and found out something extremely interesting: most of them are extremely boring. My grandparents had gone on a few trips to Europe in their old age and most of the slides from those trips are of buildings and landscapes. I guess they didn’t want photo evidence of their old skin.
The slides were stored in slide trays holding just one slide per slot. Since I’m never going to display these on a slide projector, I de-bulked by sliding three slides into each slot. Major de-bulk!! Now I’ve got lots of spare, empty slide trays!
Unfortunately, I’m not going to trash any of the slides, not even the extremely boring ones. I’m a sentimental person with too much respect for my familial past. But as I looked through the slides, I sorted them into two categories: (1) boring ones without any people in the shot that would be filed away for eternity, and (2) ones with people that I would digitize with a scanner.
Left to Right: My shirtless, hunky dad, Uncle Kim, and Grandpa Joe with great legs
I came away with three small boxes from the hundreds I looked through. Last night, I went over to UPenn to start the process of transferring these slides to the modern age so they’d be accessible again. Susan brought me to the photography computer lab where there was some special equipment just for the purpose. One that we used did 5 slides in a batch, and the results were excellent, but it was painfully slow.
The slides are from my dad’s side of the family. It’s great seeing my dad in his youth; he was a fine, young man. The process is tedious and slow, but I love having these.
Life is Real Good :D 