As I explained in a previous post, my relatively recent purchase of a film scanner, the Plustek Opticfilm 7200, was mostly to tolerated the fact that I was going to be dealing with film photography up until the purchase of a D300s to replace my D40. However, during the holidays, the new toy quickly found another use: my grandmother has boxes filled to the brim with Kodakchrome slides shot anywhere from 20 to 40 years ago, and I decided to gift her some lots of my time to scan the slides she wanted to keep, and give her a more durable digital copy.

The whole enterprise, while time-consuming, was loads of fun. My grandmother had already shown a couple of those slides to my family during Christmas a couple of years ago, but I think I missed the most of it because I had shifts during the Christmas period, back in the days where I worked at McDonalds. All in all, I found great pleasure in discovering relatives I knew very little to not at all, and rediscovering the ones close to me. Seeing your parents and grandparents at a young age is something that’s always pretty impressive, I’m sure anybody who has old family albums would agree. The photographies, apart from being beautiful in a totally innocent and accidental way, gave me a tiny taste of what it was like back in the late 60’s / early 70’s. Here are the best of the 101 mounted slides that I have scanned. Click on the pictures for a link to their respective Flickr pages, where they are available in their original sizes.

Some of those were total pain in the ass fixing up in Lightroom. At least two dozen slides were completely underexposed, and most of the others were just not presentable; flash glare, out of focus image, camera shake, the list goes on. Sadly, 5 good snaps was all I found worthy of posting.

While I have no confirmation yet, my other grandmother has been aware of my ability to scan Kodachrome for a while now, so I just might be scanning and posting some more vernacular photography. Next time, it’ll probably be more slides too… this granny has been storing her slides on ready-to-project trays, and she says she has several boxes of 100 slide trays. If you’re into those kinds of pictures, grab a feed and stay tuned, there is more to come.