Heritage Project Progress

I’ve been scanning my grandfather’s slides this week. The cute little device to the left tracks the progress I’ve made against my estimate of 3700 slides. All of the last few days’ scanning has been from the years 1946, 1947, and 1948. Many of them are of trips: the Pacific coast, southern Oregon and northern California, Colorado, eastern Washington, and Mt. Rainier. There is another set of slides of boats and a river, from a box with a note of “Allen on the Hudson.” My dad’s younger brother Allen was a coxswain on crew boats. Since none of the photos are of Allen, I’m assuming that Allen took them on a trip he took to New York for a regatta or similar event. There are also a set of shots of a football game in progress (though they’re mostly of the fans in the stands holding up cards that spell out sayings or make pictures – you don’t see much of that these days), another that shows a building being built (is it the office my grandfather had next to his home in Edmonds?), and several shots of snow around that Edmonds home (I recognize it, though the trees and hedges sure were smaller).

Many of the photos suffered from the usual technical problems (focus was a problem with this batch) and age-related issues, especially scratches and some emulsion degradation. Still, there are several interesting images to share.

The first is from a July 1946 trip to Crater Lake and the Shasta area in northern California. This dramatic, if fuzzy picture is of snow removal on the round-the-crater highway. Remember, this is July! (Click on this and later images for a larger version.)

The equipment hints at the exotic, too, at least from this vantage, though it’s hard to tell just what it is, other than a snow blower.

The next image has “Garden of the Gods” written on the slide. A quick Web search tells me that this is in Colorado. There are other slides in this set that are labeled with Utah, so there was a road trip that summer in 1947. The image is also dramatic, sharp, and powerful. I find myself straining to the left to see what this is all leaning toward. There are similar images in the Web site linked above, including some that suggest the answer.

The third image is from a slide with the note: Pacific Ocean wreck; Long Beach Wash. I think that refers to the ship, not the car, which seems to be in good shape. And, yes, that car is on the beach, right next to the tide line. It’s something weird we do in this state, though I’ve never been a big fan; it’s legal – and, in fact, exceedingly popular – to drive on most of the beaches along the Pacific Coast. I’m sure the towing companies like it, too. I don’t know anything about the wreck, but it looks like it’s been there a while. Since this shot is from March 1948, you can sure there’s nothing much left of it today.

Finally, this photo of Wenatchee from Ohme Gardens is of mostly historical interest, since the quality is poor, especially in the upper right corner. But, you can be sure that the open fields of trees that the road cuts through have been replaced by buildings and development since the picture was taken in April 1948. I looked on the Web for newer photos from this vantage and found several that suggested that I was right, but none of them were really comparable enough to this one to show the change clearly.

Heritage Project

I started a long-awaited project this month. It’s to digitize the collection of 35mm slides and 16mm movies that I inherited from my grandfather when he passed away over twenty years ago. I’ve lugged them around ever since. They were taken over several decades (I’m not sure of the entire scope), at least the Thirties through the Fifties. It’s a sizable collection: over 3500 slides and approximately 8000 feet of film.

After some research, I settled on scanning the slides myself and sending the movies out to a service. So, just after Christmas, I purchased a Nikon Coolscan V ED slide and film scanner. I’ve had it a couple of weeks now and have scanned over 100 slides (this will take a while). The process is easy enough and the scanner has enough controls to do a pretty good job with some of these very old slides.

My grandfather was a dedicated amateur photographer, taking slides, prints, and movies. Nearly all of the photos I have of myself as a baby and young boy are his. He wasn’t, however, an exceptional technician; he’s somewhat famous in the family for his poorly composed shots. I think some of that is unfair, but I’ve run across quite a few oddly composed, hopelessly underexposed, or just hopeless (a lit up window from inside a dark building, for instance) shots in the few that I’ve so far processed. Still, the idea isn’t so much to find a hidden masterpiece as to see some of what he saw, to understand what he saw as important. And that comes through pretty strongly, even this early in the process.

The best examples are a couple of movies that I was able to screen before the projector (also an antique) quit on me. One was a terrible-looking, technically speaking, shot of a lit-up Christmas tree. There was no color, just light and dark, but as I watched the camera pan over the tree, I imagined that my grandfather wanted to film this, not so much because the film would preserve or communicate the sight, but because it anchored the memory of something beautiful. The other example included both my father and his brother, but in a strange way, so that I had a hint of something new in the, somewhat troubled, relationship that my father shared with his.

I haven’t come across anything that striking in the slides, so far (only a few thousand to go), but I have seen some interesting images. I’ve selected a sample to share here. These were all taken, as near as I can tell, in 1947 (at least they were in a box from the processor with a 1947 postmark on them). My grandfather was stationed in Alaska during the Second World War, in the Aleutians (the only part North America occupied by Japan, though down at the far end of the chain), and I presume that these images are from there. I find the colors and the strength of the images interesting and impressive. (Click on the images to see a slightly larger version.)