“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl
I have a box of old slides – a collection of frames that keep moments of our family history, stories from my childhood. I remember, being a little girl, sitting in our dark living room on a winter’s night, watching the slides being projected onto a screen. We don’t do it anymore, right? We sit in front of our computers and occasionally go through the recent photos taken by our digital cameras, and let’s be honest, it does not happen that often anyway. And printing photos is not something that is done regularly these days, so a lot of our precious memories are stashed away, without resurfacing for years.
And setting up the projector (which I do have), and getting the slides out is not something that we have time for in our busy digital lives. It has become a thing of the past, something we did when we were little.
I sure do have my printed childhood photos too, mostly black and white, arranged in albums. But those old slides have always been a bit more special – full of colour, full of memories. There was also more effort involved in watching them, all that setting up of the projector and the screen, plus you had to wait for darkness to set in to be able to see those pictures.
So I had this idea for a long time, too long I would say, to scan the slides and to make a book. It took me a couple of years, but I finally did it (not without help – thanks Mum for spending hours scanning the slides!), and now those memories are more alive than ever. I can pick up the book any time. I can show my son where I came from, if he looks like me when I was a baby. I can relax that those slides are now safe, as time is not too kind to the film.
It is very easy to do. I have a very simple scanner like this one, and the results were surprisingly good when printed. I made the book using Blurb, and I could not be happier with how it turned out.
Keep your memories safe. Old photos cannot be replaced.
