More point and shoot

This has been fun! My readers who have been keeping up with the story already know I've been digging through a box of old photos with the idea of digitizing the negatives. If you haven't been following along, you can catch up here. The unexpected prize was finding a trove of negatives about 70 years old, you can read about that on my other blog here. 

Today is a personal journey about some of the photos that have emerged so far. It's likely to be a pretty erratic journey, just so you know. All of the commentary about the photos could start, "At some point along the way..." For almost all the photos we don't know exactly when they were taken. Not even approximately. I found 3 photos of our friends John and Brenda and sent them to her, and she can't remember what the occasion was either, so it isn't just us.

How quickly we forget. I learned early in my work career that I had to take notes of what I'd done along the way. My boss at the time sent me a spreadsheet and asked me to produce a similar one, with some of the same data, but including some other data, and grouping it a certain way. My fingerprints were all over the spreadsheet, but I had no memory of how I'd produced it, and I hadn't kept the SQL that generated the base data. I had a sweaty couple hours reproducing the SQL and creating the spreadsheet because he wanted it right away. After that I kept notes, keeping snippets of SQL and the creative thought processes. Sometimes it included photos of a whiteboard diagram. Sometimes I dropped the actual SQL into another tab of the xl, just in case it came back to me. That saved my bacon more than once.

But, as has become clear, I didn't do the same with the photos. Some photographers keep a notebook of all their photos, and I did when I was starting to work with film recently, and still do for the 6x9 camera, but I wasn't even remotely a photographer back then. The best we can do is go by the evidence of the photo, the furniture in the house, which cats or cars, the state of the yard.

Maybe get a beverage, this might get long.

1. There are two sets of photos of a trip to Glacier National Park in the USA. We can no longer remember if it was one trip or two. We sort of remember driving to the top as a day trip, and sort of remember coming home from something via Logan Pass, quite literally taking the scenic route. 

2. As I'm looking at the negatives I'm trying to visualize what it looks like as a positive. There's several of this critter, but as I was looking at the negatives I was trying to remember why I took so many of a rock wall. I didn't see the critter until the positive came up. Someone told us it was a wolverine, and the photos when looking on line would seem to support that. As ought to be clear, it didn't eat or maul us. Maybe it had just eaten something and wasn't hungry.

3. I'm not sure if the purple-ish tinge is the actual colour of the rocks or is an artifact of processing. 

4.

5. An assembled panorama from two photos that were not taken with the intent to merge them. Such a concept didn't exist for most people then. Even now, taking digital photos with the intent to merge them doesn't always work.

6. Some of my readers have visited our home and know of the lattice flower bed out front. Here it is under construction. Between the sun itself, and the light reflecting off the south facing window, the grass just burned up, so we decided to put in a bit of a patio. That was a fun project.

7. Nefertitti. Yes, she is expressing her personality.

8. Amelia. These cats lived together for a while, with Amelia joining us after Sebastian left us in 1998. With the best of intentions, Amelia had a bit of a tough life with us. Nefertitti bullied her a bit, just like she tried to bully everyone else, except Sebastian didn't put up with it. After Nefertitti left us we got Bernard, and they did not get along at all. Poor Amelia got beaten up pretty bad before we found another home for Bernard. Then we boarded her while we did major house renovations. I am convinced that she did not recognize us, or the house when she came back, and treated us like we were new humans. She was always a twitchy cat, if a car door slammed on the street she was out of our laps and downstairs. In her entire life the only people that opened the garage and came in that door was us, but as soon as she heard the door opening she was looking over her shoulder ready to run. The vet at the end of her life told us she probably had a bad case of dementia. You can read more about her here. 

9. Linda in Swan's Boutique hotel in Victoria BC. We went there several times to get away from winter. Oddly enough there are no other photos of the various trips, although they could be in an envelop I haven't got to yet. 

10. This might well be one of the earliest photos I've found yet, taken shortly after we built the house and moved in. Sebastian is checking it all out. The car is an 83 Honda Accord hatchback, and was the best car I've ever owned. I'd be happy to drive it again, if somehow another new one showed up. Alas.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Peony

Tombstone

The last of the three black and whites at different focal lengths.

Film

A trio from a winter walk with friends along the Bow. Kodak Gold 200.