Slides

I know you younguns' don't have a clue as to what slides are but here goes.

Today my husband and I were discussing pictures and duplicating them, etc. The subject came up because he wants to scan into the computer, pictures of antique cars he's collected over the years. I reminded him that the reason we bought the scanner was so that HE could scan in the slides and make them into pictures. But his technology brain has died and no longer works like it once did. So, that leaves it up to me.

What are slides? Slides are teeny, tiny pictures that go into a projector and you flash these pictures on a wall or screen made for showing the slides upon, thus enlarging them. Not at all like today's easy-to-look-at pictures on the computer. So I understand why he wants them on his computer. It's so easy to file them into categories now days and you have a thumbnail to pull up to view. Let's put it this way, slides are hard copies of pictures, sort of. Pictures are those things that are made from slides or negatives. Well, they used to be made from negatives.

I was thinking about that last night. It is so much cheaper now to make and print a picture than it used to be. No film to buy, just a reusable memory card for the camera. Then you download them to a CD or your computer, and tell the computer to print the picture and you don't have to wait weeks for the picture to be returned from the picture processing plant. So nice! Even when I was growing up pictures in black and white (we didn't have color yet) cost me 15 cents a piece. A roll of film held anywhere between 12 and 36 pictures. I opted for the 12-picture roll because I could afford it after saving for a couple of weeks. I would have to save up $1.80, a lot of money when your allowance was 25 cents a week!

Anyway, I looked at the number of slides Alan wants copied, and I told him I would die before I ever finished scanning them in. There has to be at least 10,000 slides and at one slide a minute, then cropping time, it will take me through eternity to get it done.

So I told him to write on my tombstone: She didn't finish her work on earth -- getting the slides scanned!

Here I am panicking about pictures that I don't remember taking or seeing -- we rarely viewed all the slides we took. It was too much trouble to get out the slide projector, the containers to put the slides into so the projector would receive them, and then get out the screen to view the pictures upon. We had a mini-viewer which was 3 inches by 3 inches, lit from behind so you could view the picture. Sort of like what you see in your view screen on your digital camera.

Will I ever get the slides scanned in? I don't know. I would like to get our wedding and honeymoon slides scanned in, and the slides of my children when they were little. But I don't even know where to find them.

You see, none of the 50 boxes of slides is labeled!!!! Not one. And the only way I'm going to find out where the slides I want are is to go through each box one by one. Each box has a minimum of 100 slides and a maximum of 500.

So, joking aside, I think I need some heavy prayer to get this project completed. And I'm serious about this. It would make Alan very happy to have the slides duplicated.

Me, too! I guess it's sort of like my friend, Stacia's free range chickens so she can get eggs. We're still waiting for the eggs.


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