GRANDAD'S SLIDES (1) - THREE RANDOM SLIDES

So, the scanner arrived a little earlier than expected and, because it was there, it only seemed sensible to try it out, and so I opened the unmarked wooden box and found three loose slides just lying around on the top of all the others.

These three slides were probably just the extra ones that wouldn't fit neatly inside the 100 slots that this particular selection of glass mounted slides was in. One of the glass holders for these three was  broken, so this seemed a good place to start experimenting...

Anyway, scan number one was of a street scene "Somewhere in Europe" and is made all the more perky because of the fact that it contains some rather wonderful old cars. As you can see, I hadn't yet worked out the best way to get the frame to line up with the scanner, and so half of the image is missing. At this point, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the image on the screen on the scanner itself, and was seriously suspecting that I had been sold a pup. However, after I had eventually zapped these three images, I whipped out the SD card and plugged it into the side of the telly and was, quite frankly, rather impressed at the results, which means, of course, that now I am rather doomed (sorry "committed") to proceeding with the project.

Anyway, slide number two seems to be a rather jolly picture of Nice-Cote D'Azur airport taken at some point in the mid-to late 1960s, or perhaps earlier. Like I mentioned earlier, this particular box is unmarked in terms of date and location, and, because they've all been remounted inside glass slide mounts, the cardboardy surround bit (which - as I now know from my explorations - is usually date stamped for the processing) is also missing. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I suspected I was about to be exposed to a hundred photographs of the south of France taken at some point during the 1960s.

I was wrong about this.

The next picture was between the two pieces of shattered glass in a broken slide mount. This appears to be an interior of an airport, and I can only assume that it is the same one. In the background is a rather impressive silver Caravelle (?) parked at the gate, although one of the shortcomings of the scanner that I've yet to explore is how to adjust the tones so that the stuff in the background is clearer than the stuff in the foreground, assuming that I can.

Anyway, later on, I removed the film from  the broken mount and I scanned it again using the negative tray and got a cleaner scan of it that didn't have any of the broken glass lines. Again, the aircraft in the background remains indistinct, but the image itself is a fascinating (well, to me anyway) insight into how international travel has changed during the last half century or so. Not least because those chairs are just so darned cool.

Interestingly enough, it was at this point that I dug out the rather magnificent Hanimex "Hanorama" personal slide viewer that was also amongst the collection of my Grandfather's photographic stuff and had another look at the slide.

And yes, that Caravelle really is a thing of beauty, even though modern technology seems determined to deprive you from seeing it. I even tried taking a picture of the slide inside the viewer using my Teffalone, but that was a stupid idea, too, given that I was trying to juggle three things in two hands, and it has a tendency towards the bleach, too, unless you can adjust the screen with that fourth hand that I also didn't have.

Still, I think it made for a (slightly) interesting photo in itself, though, and also shows what the eye doesn't see when you're looking through one of these things.

Anyway, with renewed confidence, I returned to photograph number one and, hopefully more successfully, managed to scan the whole of that initial street scene, which now includes my Grandmother sliding out of frame bottom left in order to, presumably, slip into another little shop full of souvenirs.

Once I set about scanning the contents of the actual box, it became apparent that this was not a picture taken in France at all, but the entire set seemed to be pictures from various parts of Italy, and I can only assume that this was another cruise that required the passengers to depart from Nice after flying there.

So there we are. Early evidence of the International Jet-Set lifestyle of Grandma and Grandpa, in the days when such things were far less common than they are now. It certainly looks as if they had one heck of a retirement plan, and, with that in mind, I'll start boring you with their holiday snaps sometime soon.

We'll start with Italy, some time in the 1960s...