Orphaned Objects

Realised a couple of days ago that this blog's been running for a year now and has reached a whopping dozen entries, whoopee! At the time of writing I'm knee deep in writing business plans, activity plans, interpretation and design reports and an awful lot of funding bids for my day job, but I've been fortunate enough to find time now and then to keep the family photos scanning project ticking over.  Rapidly approaching scan 10,000, it was very appropriately festive, though completely co-incidental, this week to reach Christmas 1987. To nicely round off the year then here is the author getting stuck in to some serious present opening. And wondering when we can change the wallpaper. Stay tuned for yet more intermittent blogging in 2022. In the meantime - Merry Christmas!

Apologies, the blog’s gone by the wayside a bit lately, what with most of my time being taken up with my day job managing the redevelopment of Glencoe Folk Museum in the Highlands. There are a few articles in preparation, including a series on the Chemistry for Conservators course I completed earlier this year, but in the meantime here’s a placeholder quickie returning to one of my favourite topics – digitising film negatives. Walk towards the light! Or rather, don't as you'll knock the light off the table ya clumsy get. STILL ON ABOUT SCANNING 😒 As a break from digitising my own family’s archive (9,000 scans and counting…) my good lady recently unearthed a small batch of her family photos taken in the early 1980s. I was intrigued by these because it took a while to recognise the film format. It turned out to be Kodak 126 film (the 126 deriving from the images being 26.5mm square) This was introduced in 1963 in cartridge form, a more user-friendly way of loading a camera tha...

It’s not that I’ve been too lazy to update this blog – oh no indeed! Far from it as a matter of fact. A good Curator is adept at prioritising tasks to ensure the best work is done in the best time so in the last, ahem, four months I’ve simply been working on more time-critical endeavours. Like, erm, digging a pond. And catching up with my hobby of sitting down. And drawing naff cartoons. So there. I will not be giving up the day job. Thanks for asking.   In amongst this there’s been a major funding bid to submit, a conservation-based chemistry course to get stuck into (more in a future blog…) and, last month, a museum to re-open. I know, I know – excuses excuses… Anyway… BACK AT THE SCANNING. What’s going on with the project to digitise my family’s slide collection? Well it’s kind of, erm, done. Yup. 6,451 transparencies all scanned and catalogued, a chronicle of family activities between the early 1960s and 2000. Boom. Done. Oldest and most recent slides. Each is prese...

 It's bright today. Really bright. Bright sun high in the sky, white snow on the ground, bright bright bright. Over my lunch break I decided to run a few 35mm negatives through the scanner just to keep grinding away at the Sisyphean task of digiting my family's photo collection. First scan appeared thus; Attack of the Black Smudge! Coming to a cinema near you. Ugh, this isn't good. And most peculiar - there's no marks at all on the negative, nary even a speck of dust as that gets blown off first. This is very annoying and I'm getting all hot and bothered. Ah! Hot and bothered in the glare of the incredibly bright wintery-snowy-reflecty sun. One quick shut of the curtains and a rescan later and; Absence of the Black Smudge! Coming to a cinema near you, but not very exciting. There we go. So the scanner, perched near the window, was getting overwhelmed by the sun blazing in one side. This hasn't been an issue so far given that this project has taken place in the d...

  What’s this, a suspicious package? No, but it is DA BOMB 😊   Shiny. Shiny shiny shiny. It’s a shiny new slides/negatives scanner – the Plustek OpticFilm8200i . Ta-daa! Having previously identified the scale of the task at hand to digitise my family's photograph collection, we move onto how best to scan the images and what best to scan them with... I did consider getting the Epson V600 which I’ve used professionally before and has certain advantages, such as scanning multiple transparencies simultaneously and being a generally more versatile flatbed scanner than dedicated photo scanners. However, after much research and stressing over a budget, I picked the Plustek as the best compromise between quality and affordability (even then it was at the VERY UPPER end of affordability, but hey – it’s Christmas…) There’s several flavours of the Plustek but in the end I chose the version which comes bundled with the Silverfast 8.8 AI scanning software for the extra dust removal...

I'm going to digitise my family's entire slide collection. Why? I love collections work!  'Playing with old stuff' is why I started working in museums and it's still pretty much my favourite museum thing, except for the one job where we had Cheeky Chocolate Finger Thursday. My current job is in project management, which is great (I swear rollercoasters ain't a patch on the rush of hearing one of your funding bids has been successful. No, honestly), but recently I've been having major pangs to dive back into a collection. Trouble is, this being 2020, access to my museum's store has been off-limits for most of the year. What to do? Ah-ha! Sorting out my parents' loft in the run-up to Christmas I came across the family photographs - of which there are, well, a few. Thousand. These are the transparencies. The negatives are elsewhere. And equally plentiful. I've managed digitising projects in past museums and it seemed like a sensible idea to apply th...