Scanning negatives

When our young friends were here last week, one of them asked what the odd noise was in my study. I explained that I was scanning some negatives. She looked at me, a little puzzled, and asked what I meant.

'I'm scanning some old negatives of photos,' I explained, 'and putting them on my computer.'

'Do you mean you're printing some photos?'

'No...'  I paused, and realise that this is one of the technological divides of recent history. A child of seven years old may never have seen photo negatives. Yet until ten or fifteen years ago, the majority of cameras used them.

I've always liked taking photos. Perhaps it's because I don't have much of a visual memory, I like to be able to capture people's faces and special moments on film. I had my first basic camera when I was about six or seven, with black-and-white film which we developed and printed at home. I progressed to a 35mm camera during my teens, and was very organised with my negatives, filing them in albums along with 'contact sheets' that showed positive images in thumbnail sizes, and an index at the front.

I continued doing that up until about 1978, when it became clear that developing and printing at home cost rather more than sending photos to be printed. And I wanted to start using colour film, which was a great deal more difficult (and expensive) to process at home. So I tried several different companies, both high street ones and mail order ones.  Here are a few of the envelopes I found recently:

Since the negatives came in little packets attached to the ones containing the prints, it didn't occur to me to store and catalogue them anywhere else. The prints went in albums, those I didn't want got thrown away (eventually), and the envelopes with the negatives were stored in random boxes and drawers.

I had vague thoughts of eventually getting bigger prints of some of the pictures, but it never happened... and the collection of negatives got larger and larger. I did label some of them with the date and sometimes even the subject matter, but mostly I forgot.

We bought our first digital camera in 2003, but the print quality wasn't great, so I continued using my 'ordinary' camera for prints, with the digital one for newsletters, and the family website, and - when I started it - this blog. That was a definite improvement on waiting for photos to be printed in the UK, and then using our elderly scanner to get them transferred to computer.

In 2005, after losing our first digital camera, we splashed out on a nicer one and found that the prints were now sharper better quality in general than those from my film camera. So the latter was, at last, retired, and the negative collection stopped increasing.

When we first moved to Cyprus, my old negatives were stored away in our UK house, but eventually came out here when we sold it. They were then stored in a high cupboard in our new house. Meanwhile we'd also managed to collect several slides that belonged to my grandparents, and a few quite old negative plates that my mother had been keeping. I knew there were places where one could get these things transferred to CD but they were expensive, and there were just so many of them...

In May 2007 my father was staying here, and wanted to buy me a nice present. I couldn't think of anything I wanted at first, then I wondered aloud whether it was possible to buy a scanner that would also do negatives and slides. He and the more technologically aware members of the family went to investigate, and returned with a 'CanoScan'.

Sophia, who was always a very curious cat, investigated it thoroughly when it was first set up:

(I tried to think of a clever comment about 'cat scans' but couldn't think of anything suitable)

In great excitement we followed the instructions and scanned a few of the slides, and were very pleased with the results. Then we tried a few negatives, and were even more pleased with the results. It was a bit of a complex process: only two strips of negatives can be scanned at a time, or just a couple of slides. But it worked very well indeed.

In 2010 we decided to make a special album for our thirtieth anniversary, so I hunted through photo albums and scanned either photos or negatives (if I could find them) to get pictures of us and the boys when we were younger.

A few years later, we wanted some photos for my father's 80th birthday celebrations, so I scanned some of my old (and well-organised) black-and-white negatives.

A year after that, a cousin wanted some old photos for her parents anniversary, so I did some more scanning. And I thought, several times, how nice it would be to get ALL my negatives scanned, and organised on the computer, and maybe made into new albums....

... but it was all quite daunting. I did spend a few Saturdays doing a lot of scanning, but during the week it returned to being a spot for Cleo to sleep on:

Then one day, last Autumn, I wanted to scan something and the scanner refused to speak to my computer. I tried everything, to no avail. My technically minded son tried different leads and different USB ports and everything he could think of... and it still didn't work.

We assumed that the scanner had stopped working.  Richard reminded me that he had an identical one which he rarely used, so suggested we switch them.  Several weeks later we tried... only to find that his one wouldn't speak to my computer either, while my one worked perfectly with his computer.

It turned out to be a problem with the operating system, but after much frustration and many experiments, we finally got a version of the CanoScan software that works for me. A little klunky: I have to switch the scanner off and on again after each scan, but I can deal with that.

So I decided to make the effort to work through ALL my negatives, one film per day.  If the last software update made it more difficult to scan, the next one might make it impossible; the scanner is, after all, nearly nine years old.

Here are some of the negatives waiting to be scanned:

I've done about ten films so far.  There are at least two hundred more to do, but that means I should have finished by the end of the year.

Back to my small friends, their mother and I managed to explain, roughly, what negatives are and how they worked. The girls' response was that they sounded SO COOL! They thought I should put them on my walls as decoration, because it would be AWESOME to see photos where all the colours were reversed...

I don't always like modern technology, but I am very happy with my digital camera. I wouldn't ever want to go back to the old methods.

Ten years of blogging about Cyprus

It was quite by chance - if such a thing exists - that it occurred to me that I started blogging 'about' ten years ago.  Out of curiosity I checked right back to March 2005's archive posts - and found, to my surprise, that it was exactly ten years ago today when I began this blog.

Skimming through those posts, I began to wonder just what had really changed. Oh, we've moved house, and our sons have grown up and left home. One is married with an almost-nine-month-old baby. Three of our original cats are no longer with us. We've made new friends and learned new board games. A couple of years ago my mother died, and our younger son, who spent five years living in the UK, moved back to Cyprus.

I have more lines on my face and considerably more grey hairs, but the essential 'me' is no different as far as I can tell. Comparing a very recent photo of me with my grandson, and one from ten years ago, with Tessie, I see - suddenly - why people thought I looked younger than I was, when I was in my mid-forties:

Since those first blogging days, I have learned how to add more than one photo to a post, which has been a useful skill.  I'm intrigued to read a very long-winded set of posts at the end of March 2005 about a 'typical day' in my life; in that, too, it seems, not a whole lot has changed. There are only two of us here most of the time, and - thankfully - no garden. I wondered if I might miss it, but I haven't yet.  But while the fine details of day-to-day housework, shopping and cleaning have inevitably altered over the years, in a broader 'big picture' sense, they're little different.

We use euros rather than Cyprus pounds now, and the cost of living has, inevitably, risen. But I still squeeze orange juice each morning. We still rely primarily on solar heating for hot water, but have to boost it sometimes with the electric immersion heater. However, mains water is always available these days so I no longer have to do all my laundry on just one day when the mains was on, for fear of running out of water. We take it for granted now; I try to be careful but it's easy to let the tap run a bit too long, or to take an extra-long shower when there is water always on tap.

I still make yogurt, though I use long-life milk now. I still have a four-weekly menu on the fridge, much adjusted over the years, but I only stick to it loosely. A slow-cooker has made some meals much easier and allows me to freeze portions for easy re-heating. A breadmaker means that I rarely go out to buy bread from the bakery. Best of all, from the kitchen perspective, is having a dishwasher, something which changed when we bought our own house in 2006.

I still keep my book reviews blog (and several others); I still seem to spend longer than I should on emails, although there are few if any forum mails these days. Instead, I skim Facebook: sometimes rapidly, sometimes not. Time still has a tendency to run away from me even though I'm no longer trying to juggle meals, laundry and general schedules for our busy sons. It seems, looking back, that my 'typical day' was really quite full: these days, I still sometimes wonder what I did, yet I always seem to be doing something, usually reasonably constructive.

We've been away in the UK for the past couple of weeks, spending time with a large number of family members and driving from the Southernmost part of England to - almost - the border with Scotland. It was wonderful, and refreshing, and tiring too, enlivened (or, rather, the reverse) by the norovirus bug.

I'm wondering, now, what the next ten years will bring.

Having started this post with not just one but two pictures of me - unusual, as I'm normally the one behind the camera - I'll end it with one of the photos that makes me smile the most from the past couple of weeks.

Four generations of my family; four out of five of my favourite guys in all the world:

The end of Lent

Given to us in Advent, our poinsettia, now outside my study, is still thriving at the end of Lent:

We don't usually do a whole lot during Lent, other than (if we remember) eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and hot cross buns on Good Friday.

But at the end of February, while chatting over the dinner table about food in general and the cost of groceries, Richard made an idle comment that perhaps we could try giving up meat for Lent. Since I have decidedly vegetarian leanings I thought this was a great idea, and Tim said that in Anglican tradition, Sundays (and other feast days) are excluded from Lenten fasts, so perhaps we could stop eating meat for six days a week only...

As it happened, in the first week of Lent we had friends staying, one of whom is a vegetarian anyway. So it made a good excuse for me to experiment with a few new recipes, as well as making some old favourites such as Spanokopitta, or vegetable and nut cobbler.

It doesn't help that Richard and Tim are both dairy-free; cow's milk products cause their ears to block up. Goat and sheep cheese are fine in moderation - perhaps once or twice per week - but it meant that I had to experiment with other forms of protein, primarily beans and lentils. Some of the things we ate were pretty good; others less successful, although I don't think anything was inedible.

It's been interesting, but although I haven't felt any cravings or inclinations to eat meat for the past six weeks, Richard definitely has. I'm convinced that some people actually need meat for their metabolism and general health, and he seems to be one of them. So we'll be back eating meat four or five times per week as of tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Daniel and some of his colleagues in the UK were producing a series of mini videos which they released during Lent; one per week at first, and then several this past week. They are in the form of a modern video blog, taking the events leading up to Easter as if happening in the 21st century, from the point of view of the apostle Matthew.  This is the trailer for the whole series:

It took me a little while to get used to the style, but I've liked it very much. It's quite thought-provoking, and certainly helps to understand a little better what it might have been like to be one of the first disciples.

Links to the whole series can be found (with the most recent at the top) at the Matt's Blog, or the related Facebook page.

When we first moved to Cyprus, Lent was quite a big thing: the Greek Orthodox (who are the majority in this country) are supposed to fast from meat and various other foods during Lent. But even in fifteen years, secularism is growing stronger, and there seem to be fewer and fewer who take any notice of Lent.

Well, other than some teenagers and young adults, presumably bored and unemployed, who collect wooden items from around their neighbourhoods - not always with permission - and have bonfires each evening, usually culminating with a huge one on Easter Saturday. Here's a site of an unofficial bonfire site near where our friends live:

In recent years these have become more competitive, and are often accompanied by home-made firecrackers, which are extremely dangerous as well as illegal. Every year there is an accident of some kind; last night our friends' neighbour, a young man in his twenties, was rushed to hospital after a firecracker exploded in his hand. The police were involved, and the bonfire site cleared, later on; but how terrible for the young man and his family.