I have a self-imposed deadline of Midnight Tuesday for these columns. One thing I keep hearing about writing on the socials and podcasting is that you need to be consistent on the timing of your posts.
The reason this is going out on Thursday instead of Tuesday is that I fell down a photo-digitizing rabbit hole.
More on that later.
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I just ordered a 15” M3 MacBook Air for use in digitizing, editing and producing photos, video and audio to post online, and I could use help paying for it. :)
The reason I ordered the Mac is that I have digital files of two 7” reels of old 8mm home movies, plus something like 170 GB (and growing) of digital photos and videos from digital cameras and phones that I want to sort through and curate. I’ll share my productions as I finish them. I’m finding the tools available on Windows, plus the difficulty of moving files back and forth between my iPhone and iPad to be, shall we say, cumbersome.
I played around with a trial version of Apple’s Final Cut Pro for iPad and I really liked it, so I bought a “Productivity Pack” of software along with the MacBook that includes Final Cut Pro, plus Logic Pro (Music composition), Motion Pro (Motion graphics creator for FCP), Compressor (for use with FCP) and MainStage (appears to be kind of a Logic Pro DJ app).
So I have lots of toys coming to play with.
I think the balloon sculptures in the photo above made by Linda. Listen to Neon Signs, Episode 5 of the podcast.
I don’t remember what happened to them. I have a vague memory of them getting squashed during a move so I may have pitched them.
I plan to sort through, delete bad exposures, duplicates, boring shots, etc., then go through what’s left and edit the metadata to correct dates and locations as best I can and add descriptions identifying people in the photos and the occasion as near as I can remember.
For instance, here’s a shot from a softball game full of estholes (listen to the podcast episode about est) who I know I used to know, but who's names I’ve forgotten. From the sign in this photo it was taken at a field used by Del Rey Little League, which puts it somewhere in West LA or maybe Marina Del Rey:
I remember hotly perusing the young lady wearing green terrycloth with absolutely no success. I have lots of photos of my unrequited loves. :)
I’ll also be working on color correction, dust removal, etc.
Debbie found a box of 35mm negatives and slides from Dad’s collection that he apparently didn’t get around to digitizing. There are also something like 30 reels of 8mm and Super8 movie film in that box to go along with the 12 or 13 reels I already knew about. From the labels they’re everything from home movies of my niece and nephew to professionally shot water skiing footage from my parent’s neighbor, Rich Richardson, a movie cameraman for Boeing. I think it was Boeing. Maybe it was North American Aviation or one of the many, many other Aerospace companies in Southern CA in the 70s.
I also dug out a large box of negatives and slides I took in the ‘70s that I plan on digitizing and editing.
Since paying a service to digitize all that movie film would cost something over $1000, I was contemplating popping $420 for an 8mm/Super8 film digitizer.
Then I found out the Orange County Library has a digitization lab I can use for free with just my library card. Some of the negatives and slides I inherited from Dad are larger format than my still film digitizer can handle, and the Library has scanners that can handle them.
I’ll be making an appointment to start digitizing all this soon.
I still have Dad’s old film projector and a movie screen. I’m thinking about where I can set them up to use my phone to film the screen while I add audio commentary for use once I start making higher quality digitized versions. If need be I can mark just the parts I wat to digitize to save time at the library’s digitization lab.
So I have my work cut out for me.
I’ll post my re-edited DOASG Podcast episode tomorrow. Or maybe Saturday. It’s that kind of week.
And I wondered how I was going to fill my time after I retired…
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That absolutely is Will Roger's state park, did a lot of commercials there.