Weekends can be tricky! But the streak must go on.
There aren’t any tweets in my Notes file today, but this might’ve been a good self-deprecating thought, whether or not it’s original:
Y’know, for someone who likes to avoid conflict, I sure do enjoy replaying every one in my head over and over again.
Photo projects, like figuring out how to recover and host and categorize 15+ years of images from across multiple social networks, are a bit of a cobbler’s children problem for me.
My mom is a photographer, and did portraits and parties for years, but our own family photo archives included a few key albums and the rest flowed through cardboard boxes and closets and offices and filing cabinets from house to house to house.
There were blue boxes of slides, piles and piles of negatives, contact sheets, black and white 8x10s from the early years when our laundry room doubled as a darkroom, and boxes on boxes on boxes of proofs.
So here I am, the cobbler’s child, going through my own digital boxes, trying to track down file names in years-old “to print” folders that have been carried from camera to card to iMac to Flickr to Dropbox to Drive to iMac to send off into some consumer-facing cloud printing system.
A couple years back, in a previous Flickr-panic, I started backing everything up in Google Photos, but not at full resolution.
So, here’s a fun file, one of the oldest that I know I took that’s in our online archives:
It’s a scene from the road on the way back from the job in New Mexico where I met my wife. It’s probably from June 2001, and I think it’s Texas.
That was definitely taken with a film camera. I don’t think I was push processing color then, but who knows, maybe it was some 800 speed stuff. Printed as a proof at Spectra on Avenue A (?) soon after, and scanned on my really crappy flatbed scanner at the time (thanks mom, it was great), as evidenced by the vertical magenta stripe about a third of the way in.
That stripe, in turn, was one of the reasons I started messing around with Photoshop (also thanks mom!), so it’s hard to know for sure how much goofiness I added with filters there.
It must have made its way to Flickr at some point, but this one is old enough it could be on Photo.net, where I would post a few things around 2001-2002. (I continue to be amazed this site still exists.)
And after that? Did it travel from hard drive to CD to hard drive to USB stick to hard drive to Google Photos? Or is this a copy that was resized (smaller) to upload via 56K baud modem?
I have no idea.
Ryan Sholin 