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Two unrelated and dissimilar events took place recently. First, I received word from friends that a sixties high school classmate passed away. Way back then he was an adorable teen and a member of a popular boys’ group. When I heard of his passing I ran to my yearbook and found his photo. To me he will always look the way he did in that photo: young, vibrant, and smiling. I’ll explain the second event later in this posting.
On January 1st of this year I began the huge task of organizing family photos. Most of us have been guilty of shoebox storage, stacks of banded photos with no dates, and photo losses due to damage from water leaks and even infestations. Everyone I’ve talked to over the years pines for the day they are going to organize their photos. Most of us do not do that until we retire which is why I was finally able to tackle this seemingly insurmountable task.
In my collection I have over 100 years worth of photos. I am fortunate that my maternal grandmother and her family maintained a photo history of those early years and carefully passed them down to my mom. They are fantastic pictures with great old hats and dresses and wonderful cars with dapper family members standing next to them dressed to the nines. My father’s sisters also shared many great old photos with us from my east coast family. That part of the family stretches all the way to before the revolution and I have some very early photos that are precious. [See photo on the left with the group of theatrically dressed kids. My dad is in the middle of the back row.]
When I began my own photo collection I was quite young. I took photos of my grammar school friends and have them all. Over the course of my 65 years, along with my family’s contributions to my collection, I ended up with 20,000 or so photos. Some were fuzzy and the processing chemicals didn’t hold up and had to be tossed but most survived. In my entire life I only have one regret: that I didn’t purchase better quality cameras. Part B of the regret is that I didn’t have a movie camera or video camera until just a few years ago.
My daughter knew the “great photo project” was on my retirement project list so for Christmas of 2009 she gave me Photoshop software. She knew many of the photos would need work. I hadn’t made a commitment to start the project at that time because I had so many other projects on my list but with that gift I decided it was time.
Because I’ve always been a prolific camera bug I did a fair job of organizing my photos over the years but still ended up with a giant old TV box filled with thousands of photos. Within the box I had the presence of mind, fortunately, to keep the photos in paper bags organized by towns I’ve lived in since birth. I had organized them this way early on and it was a sensible system. I always lugged this box from home to home and worried about its storage and possible loss with so many moves. It was never stored in a garage but always in an indoor closet. The top of the box was always closed and a plastic trash bag was placed over it. On the rare occasions when I forgot to lock it down one of my cats would make it a home base and the top layer of photos would be full of fur and little bits of food and God knows what else. My wonderful box is now in box heaven.
During the years of TV box storage I would often take a bag out of the box and put the photos in albums declaring I was going to finally complete this project. I’d spend a few weekends on it and then realize what a huge job it would be to complete the entire box so I would shove it back in the closet. I did this several times over the years so that the photos were in fairly reasonable order and I had a few albums completed. When the kids were born my photo record keeping evolved into nightmarish proportions. And because I was a busy mom I didn’t touch the photos for years but still kept photos in paper bags labeled with the town/city I lived in and stuffed it all in the TV box. Whenever I moved to another place, the box always rode in the car with me to our new home, never in a truck. If we had to stay in a hotel prior to our final moving destination the box came inside the room with us.
Now I’m retired and my kids are grown and before there are grandchildren I decided to start in earnest and to not stop until I finished. As of this writing I only have one album left. I’ll explain why it’s the last at the end. When it’s done I will have 26 albums (all the cities and towns I’ve lived in plus special albums with themes) containing the more than 20,000 photos. Originally I had 13,000 but then found more and borrowed my mom’s so it grew. Some of the albums are quite large because I lived in certain towns longer than others.
I started the project on January 1 and have worked on it every single day since then. On days when I had normal activities to accomplish I still squeezed in a few hours of the project so that not a single day has gone by without at least a little work. During some parts of the project I spent many 15- and 16-hour days. This explains why so many of us wait till retirement to tackle such a project.
The first part of the project was to pull the TV box out of the closet (not easy) and line up all the photo bags on my sofas. I started with my birth city, San Jose, and concluded with my current city, Santa Rosa. Some of the cities had more than one bag. There were additional bags of vacation albums, office albums, special occasions, etc. More than half of the bags contained regular photos but somewhere in the ‘90s digital photos became popular and I had many disks without photos in later bags. They saved me from more work than I could possibly imagine.
After organizing all the bags and collecting photos from my mom, I started scanning them all into the computer. I filled the scanner glass with as many photos as I could squeeze on it and later separated them by duplicating and cropping on my computer rather than scanning individual photos which would have taken way too long and may have worn out my scanner. Even with the multiple photo method of scanning I was on my feet for hours and hours and I only scanned an hour at a time to avoid overheating my scanner. Scanning took weeks but when I got to later bags I found the disks and then things moved a lot more quickly. Carpal tunnel is expected any day.
After all the scanning, I arranged the photos of a particular bag on the computer in chronological order or if I couldn’t do that then by event or in some cases I’d group all the photos into categories such as holidays, school days, etc. This is when the procedure slowed down because I had to use Photoshop on many of the older poor quality photos. Photoshop is wonderful but the procedure is laborious and I found I spent way too much time fixing individual photos. I could tell that if I continued trying to make perfect photos I’d be completing this project in a rest home. So as I organized the photos on my computer I would only “fix” the photos that were very special. Way too many were special.
After most of the photos were on the computer I developed major computer problems--too many photos (plus I already have a huge music collection on my computer). So I took all the photos off the computer and put them all on disks and ended up working on one album at a time on the computer. A rather time consuming task taking them all off and putting them on disks because, again, I had 20,000 photos.
Once a particular city was completed I then took the jpegs and turned them into slideshows with music that fit the era or events depicted in the grouping. Early on I included graphics and clip art but that was bogging me down so I stopped that. After the slideshows were complete I turned them into DVDs then made two copies of the show, one for me and one for storage at my mom’s in the event something happens to them here. After the slideshows I made two copies of the jpegs, many with improved quality, again, a copy for me and a set for storage at mom’s. In a few months I plan on making sets for each of the kids.
I then went to Snapfish.com and made beautiful photo books with the jpegs. Though they have a wonderful system it is still labor intensive to organize them all in book format and I made quite a few mistakes at first. I’m now an expert so later books have gone more smoothly. I have decided to do these beautiful books rather than the traditional bulky photo albums because they are slim and easier to store than binders and albums and if anything happens to them they remain on Snapfish forever and can be reprinted. I ordered one immediately after completion of one of my first albums and it’s fantastic. My plan is to order one a month until I have them all because they aren’t cheap and I’m making a set for me and a set for each of my kids. For the math impaired that will be a total of 78 albums. In each book they will also get a copy of the DVD slideshow and a separate jpeg disk so that they can print out copies of any photo they might like to have out of that particular book. Whew!
So that’s the nuts and bolts of the project with many assorted side stories I could share but suffice to say that with any project of this magnitude there will always be hair pulling and I had my share. I purchased this computer with that project in mind and told the sales associate what I had planned and he didn’t suggest the right computer for the magnitude of the job. Some young tech types see the older woman standing before them and assume they are one step up from a typewriter. That is so not me. I’ve been a computer geek from the beginning.
I had one trip to the Apple Store when over night I lost most of the albums but a great tech found them on my backup external drive—--all but one. I couldn’t find them myself on the external drive because I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and my backup system is a little strange. I had most of the shows on disk but had run out of disks and stupidly kept working without copying them once completed.
The true grit of the project, however, is that I became intimately acquainted with every single photo in the collection. Many that I had previously placed in photo albums were familiar to me but I had some incredible surprises in store for me from photos I hadn’t seen since the day they were placed in their bag and put in the TV box. In fact, when I heard of the passing of my high school classmate mentioned in the first paragraph I ran to my yearbooks and discovered more photographic emotions, which filled four books and I spent more than a couple of hours reviewing my teens.
I’ve spent many days in a glazed melancholy as I’ve watched the aging and health deterioration of family and friends then no more photos of that beloved person in following albums. All the Christmases to follow got smaller and smaller over the years as people moved away or sadly, were gone forever. Fewer and smaller family events, no more picnics on my dad’s wonderful picnic table that he made where we all gathered to have his wonderful food and visit, smaller Christmas trees with fewer presents underneath. I spent many days so sad to realize I had lost touch with friends and neighbors since I had moved around so much.
To my horror I saw photos of people whose names I no longer remembered. To my even greater horror I saw photos of people I had no recognition of whatsoever. It isn’t senility. It’s living all over the place during my 65 years and taking photos of anyone and everyone.
One early rule of photography I adhered to was never to take a picture of a “thing.” It had to have a human or a pet in it. When looking at the Grand Canyon I perched my kids at the ledge and told them to move here and there so as to not obscure the view and thereby not only did I preserve the beauty of the canyon but also the memory of the time I almost killed my kids on vacation. Ah, memories. [See aforementioned photo at left.]
Seeing old photos of good times and times that eventually went sour were poignant to say the least. Sometimes I laughed and cried at the same time. Of the photos that had serious quality issues I spent way too much time with Photoshop bringing them back to life because I so desperately wanted certain photos to survive. The physical operation of this project was tremendous but I had no idea what it was going to do to me emotionally. Some memories were joyful and some were painful but all were emotional beyond belief. When I got to the point where I was adding music to the slideshows I often broke down. The combination of the music and the photos just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
And so this brings me to the second unrelated but similar event that occurred which was the passing of a very special cat. This cat was a stray that came to my daughter’s college apartment one day. She was the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. My daughter fed her emaciated little body and took her to the vet and had her examined and vaccinated and spayed and she came to live with my daughter and her roommate. Not long after Simba (though she was a female my daughter loved “The Lion King” and named her Simba) they received word from the apartment manager that they were not able to keep a cat-—no pets allowed. So her roommate drove from Chico to Santa Rosa with the little cat and brought her to my house. The intention was that when my daughter found a place where she could have a cat she would take her back. That was fourteen years ago and the cat never went back to Chico. [Photo at left.]
Of all the albums I have completed I saved the “pet” album for last. Though all the albums have photos of our pets most of the pet photos I put aside to assemble into one large collection. Simba has fourteen years of photos in that album. I’m not sure why I saved the pet album for last, but I found that while working on the various bags of photos I was often moved to tears when I saw a pet I loved so much and only knew a short time, comparatively. It’s going to take me a while to finish that album because it has over 1000 photos. Not all are salvageable but I know I’ll be working on some of them very diligently with Photoshop.
I’ve already started a new album for current photos of events beginning in 2010 (the year I turned 65) but it’s all on the computer. No more bags, no more scanning, no giant TV box. And I do have a better camera now. I’m glad I launched this project but it turned into a significant life event. Sort of like a multi-month family and class reunion all rolled in to one. One very long reunion.
[Update: After I completed this blog my stepsiblings’ mom passed away peacefully at 93. I have included a wonderful photo of her to the left of this screen and have added it to my collection. 93--fantastic!]
www.sharonstrawhandgarner.com
Each week in this spot I will report an instance of good customer service (if any) but without embellishment. Just a business that knows how to treat customers.
This week I received excellent customer service from (all on Saturday!):
Bank of America, Coddingtown Branch, Santa Rosa---Ana & Crystal
Apple Store, Santa Rosa Plaza---Ryan
Kaiser Pharmacy, Santa Rosa---Michael
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