This week I have started a project of scanning old pictures from albums: the kind of albums with sticky pages and plastic coverings. Over the years, most of the coverings have come lose and many of the pictures have come unstuck, falling out when the albums are opened. I had also taken out a lot of the pictures to use when I wrote my book for the grandchildren. Mama had given me two of her albums and others to my sister. There are several pictures with no name(s), and while I remember some of them I want to record the ones I do know.
We didn't have a camera when I was little, so there are very few pictures from my early childhood. The pictures I have were mostly made by relatives who had come to visit my grandma, and some by the local photographer whose office was up a long flight of stairs in a building downtown on Main Street.
Working with these pictures made me think of my passion for cameras in years past. ( I wrote about the first camera I had in a post for August 17, 2011, The Camera.) My sister, Wanda, bought a real camera while she was in high school and my first real camera was given to me when I was in high school. We only used black and white film; colored pictures were just too expensive for us.
When the Farmer and I became seriously involved, we each chipped in $15.00 and ordered a 35mm camera from Sears, Roebuck, which was replaced several years later by a better 35mm, and we were able to make colored slides with it. We took lots and lots of black and white pictures of our little girls too (duplicates show up everywhere!), especially after the Farmer began developing his own film. He set up a darkroom in the bathroom and when the two oldest girls were teens, photography became a hobby for them. (My maternal grandfather had his darkroom set up in his cellar in the 20s and the pictures were printed on postcard sized paper.)
How things have changed in just the last few years! I now have a small digital camera but I can't take very good pictures with it because of hand tremors. It has advantages over those first cameras though. With those first black and white pictures, it might take weeks to complete the roll of film, then the roll had to be packaged up and mailed to be developed, and then returned, only to find some of the pictures were no good. New cameras give one the option to delete anything she doesn't like.
And now there's the cellphone technology: instant viewing and sharing, even videos. What can possibly be next?
Whew! This is long!
Charlotte
