NEW PROJECT

Today, I am as pleased as I ever can be to be able to announce a (not very) exciting new project in that, after much procrastination and general dilly-dallying (unless, of course, those are both entirely the same thing), I've decided to order myself a negative and slide scanner in order to finally set about going through my grandfather's (relatively) vast selection of slides and, perhaps (if I don't get too bored or distracted), then set about going through my own negatives from the dawn of time and get the lot archived.

Grandad's slides have sat in a number of boxes since he died in 1980, and, since we cleared out my grandparent's house as my grandmother moved into her last home way back in 1988, they have moved along with me but they have rarely seen the light of day since. I do have his old projector and screen, and even one of those hand-held backlit viewers, but have rarely sat down and looked through them with any commitment.

Anyway, I reckon it's about time I did something with them, and the opportunity to "digitise" them is probably one that is too good to miss. After all, there's a better chance that they'll get looked at if they're in an "easy to view" format online.

On the whole, I don't imagine that they'll be of all that much interest, really. Lots of snapshots of long-dead people who I never knew and certainly won't recognise, but my grandparents did go on several holiday cruises during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I imagine that his record of some of the places they went to might be of more general interest.

He was an odd cove, though. His filing system leaves a lot to be desired. I suspect that he knew what the labels meant and consequently thought that this would be more than adequate. Unfortunately, labelling your photographs with a year and just the name of the ship is unlikely, I imagine, to help with identifying many of the places, so I suspect that we're likely to be setting out on a very enlightening voyage of discovery as we go along.

And let's face it… Other people's holiday snaps can be as dull as ditchwater, and when you're as removed from the source as we all are (and you, dear reader, especially), the chances are that this is unlikely to be all that thrilling an experience for any of us.

That said, a wise man once said (or was it just me?) that the one thing that turns a banal photograph into an interesting one is time, so, well, you never know. It might be fun looking back on those lost times, smiling faces, and bewildering hats and beachwear.

However it all turns out, I'm unlikely to try to deal with more than one box at a time, so there's little chance of there being too much at a time to bore you, and there's a very, very good chance that I won't be able to get the settings right to get the device I've ordered to actually work at all, so this could all be yet another of Martin's Spectacular Online Follies, or, at the very least, a colossal waste of everyone's time and energy.

Anyway, the kit is yet to show up, and I'm liable to take a while to figure out just how the gizmo I've ordered actually works, so don't hold your breath for any exciting blasts from the past any time soon. (After all, I do have the rather worrying suspicion that I'm only really posting this at all so that I feel that somehow I will ave to make the effort and jolly well do it...)

Do, however (if you feel so inclined) "stay tuned!"