I have already worked my way through most of the low-hanging fruit of my photo files.  I’ve posted a few albums of relatively recent photos.  I’ve posted nearly all the scans I made of the photographs and documents I inherited from my parents.  I’ve posted nearly all of the slides/transparencies I’ve shot.  Once I finish working through the captions I will begin scanning black and white negatives.  I plan to caption each set of scans as I complete them.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, my relative poverty affected my photography.  I shot photos in the least expensive way possible unless I had a good reason not to – usually either I really wanted color or I had someone footing the bill.  I began shooting black and white photographs on a roll film camera because my parents were paying.  That didn’t last long. 

Around the birth of my sister in 1967 my parents bought a Polaroid Swinger.  I got to shoot a few photographs on that camera in that format, but again their purse strings were tight.  “Meet the Swinger.  It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive.  It’s only nineteen dollars and ninety-five.  Swing it up.  It says ‘yes.’  Take the shot.  Count it down.  Zip it off.”  The advertising jingle didn’t tell you that you had to smear a foul-smelling chemical across the print right after it developed or it would soon fade.  I cannot forget that acrid smell.

The cheapest photography in the 1970s was black and white.  I could get a 36-exposure roll of 35mm Kodak Tri-X for about $1.30.  You could also get a 100-foot roll of film for around $12 or so.  There was a small machine called a bulk loader.  You put the 100-foot bulk film roll in one end in a light-tight compartment, feeding the tail of the roll into another compartment.  You put a re-usable film cassette into the other compartment of the loader, shut the light-tight lid, and turned a crank to wind the film into the cassette.  The more expensive loaders had frame counters so that you would know exactly how many frames you had loaded into the cassette.  This was important because one would normally tape the tail of the bulk film onto the spool of the cassette in the light before clamping the light-tight lid shut.  This meant that the last two or three frames of the roll were already exposed and thus useless.

I don’t know how many times the best photo of the day was exposed uselessly onto the already-fogged last three frames of the roll.

The bulk loader dropped the price of each frame of film down to just a few cents.

The next way to save money was to forego making a print of each and every frame.  Instead, you would cut the film into lengths of five or six frames and, in the orange light of the darkroom, arrange these film strips onto an 8 x 10-inch sheet of unexposed photo paper.  You would lay a piece of glass across the arranged film strips, hoping that they would not curl up and roll away.  After exposing light to the film strip array, you would process the paper like any other photo print.  This sheet of paper then had a copy of each photo that you’d shot on the film, but at the same size of the film.  This is called a contact sheet.

I have maybe 40 three-ring binders filled with contact sheets of the photos I shot between 1972 and 1985.  Nearly all are 35mm, but a few are 120-roll film.  Scanning those negatives is the next phase of this project.

In 1988 I went to law school and lost access to a dark room.  I didn’t have any time available for processing anyway.  In 1989, my new sweetheart Suby and her 4-year-old daughter Jill moved in with me in Eugene.  We married that summer and were pregnant that winter.  I kept shooting photographs but I changed format to 35mm color prints.  One could not easily make duplicates of slide film.  Instead, to provide copies of my photographs to family and friends, I routinely ordered two-copy prints of all my negatives. 

I have a box of baby-wipe plastic containers filled with the original paper envelopes holding color negative film from the years 1989 through 2005 or so.  Those photographs will be phase three of this project, sometime in the distant future.

My then-wife Sara gave me a digital camera sometime around 2000.  The images were perhaps 160 kb and tiny.  As the years went by the technology improved.  I think I finally made the complete jump to digital around 2005.  Eventually I will get to adding those photographs, too. 

By that time photo-recognition software will be so ubiquitous that I probably won’t need to trouble to add captions.  I look forward to the advent of technology that will unblur the photographs I’ve taken with my digital cameras when I accidentally turn off  ‘auto-focus.’

On the one hand this entire project seems quite daunting.  I remember when I was 21 and heard that Ansel Adams stopped taking photographs in his 30s to devote his time to making excellent prints of the negatives he already had.  What was his motivation?  Did he want to send the best of his work out into posterity?  Did his muse leave?  Did he just want to earn the big bucks that people were willing to pay for his youthful classics?

On the other hand I recognize that when this over, it will be over.  It’s a balance between wanting to go on forever looking at all these images, or just wanting it over.

I hope you join me in this journey.