VER a year ago, I decided to spend a few hours of my vacation congragating and picking up school archives of mine, which were rather comprehensive. This time, for a change, I opted for digitisation of a lifetime of photographs, having already accumulated every recoverable paper archive in my possession. It is a project I have envisioned for myself over a year ago, in parallel to the aforementioned activity.

So, I took a large collection of albums and began scanning them by the page at the high resolution of 2552×3508 pixels. I then saved as highest quality JPEG‘s, which suffer from no visible ‘lossiness’. I am far from completion, having spent just a couple of days mechanically handling these albums. In the future I will begin by scanning albums of myself, then process the combined albums, siblings, parents, and finally grandparents and ancestors. Many days of work remain on the horizon. It may take years to cover the many decades of photography into digital form. It is like a housekeeping duty that compensate for a century of memories, which have been stored in a volatile and degrading form.

I finally have all my family pictures (baby pictures included) readily available on the hard-drives and I can make copies or burn CD-ROM‘s to relatives, shall I ever wish to do so. At some point, I could run overnight enhancement scripts to remove speckles, calibrate, slice, and balance the colours of all scans. Below is a sample page; one among 500+ page which I have scanned so far. It contains a few photos that remind me of simpler times.

I am more than pleased to share and show more baby photos. It is a simple cut-and-paste job, having completed all of these digitisation.

Click image for full size (warning: 1.3 MB JPEG)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.