I have been fortunate to have inherited my grandfather’s collection of photographs and various stories about the Bixby side of the family. He wrote many stories about his experiences growing up on a farm in Minnesota in the early 1900’s for the local historical society in his town. These stories have been edited and typed up by my cousin so they can be distributed around the family. Many of the old photographs, often glued or printed on heavy cardboard or card stock have been laid flat on a scanner to be preserved as a digital file. Yet, the old photographs continue to survive tucked into filing cabinets ready to be scanned again. There are not as many photos as today and most are formally posed instead of informal shots.
Photos taken in the last 15 years or so have been taken with digital cameras and more recently iPhone cameras. They have been shared around the family, printed and framed and even printed on the side of mugs and coffee cups! They are less often formally posed to commemorate a wedding or a birthday. We have collected huge piles of photos and only a select few get preserved.
In between the photographs from my grandfather’s generation and my children’s the most common way to document with photographs was with slide film. We have thousands of slides from family vacations, our first apartment, our first dog, etc. My Dad used slide film to document our travels to the Philippines in 1955-56. I have boxes of his slides that I would love to view and share…if I could just get them digitized (we don’t even have a slide projector any more). Another issue, he used a mix of Ektachrome and Kodachrome film and the former did not hold true colors over time. Those slides are not worth trying to save.
To the rescue…an app for my iPhone! I found an ad for the SlideScan app ($29/year). If you look it up at the App Store there is a nice video about how it works. It looked pretty simple…hold a slide in front of a white screen and using the app, press a button on my phone and it will scan the slide and save it digitally.
I found a few challenges in using the app. One, I couldn’t figure out how to get a white screen on my computer; two, I couldn’t hold the slide still enough; three, I couldn’t hold my phone still enough while pressing and holding the button for three seconds with one hand!
With Bert’s help, we found a very affordable light board. It plugs right in with a USB to a regular plug or to the computer. Here’s the box it came in (from Amazon, of course!):
That took care of the light. Then, I needed a way to hold my camera steady while I held the button for three seconds. Bert found this CamStand that looked sturdy and adjustable:
Here’s the assembly sheet, because of course it came as a pile of screws and rods:
So, once everything arrived and was set up, I could put the light board on the stand, put my phone in the holder, put a slide on the light board and press the button for 3 seconds to scan a slide.
Now, I could work with the digital picture! I can hardly wait to capture more photos!
The digital photos are stored in the app on my phone. I can email them to myself, name them and organize them. Yea!! A solution to a problem that’s been bothering me a long time. Stay tuned for more stories about our travels way back then! Enjoy!
Please comment or email me directly at marykisner@comcast.net.