Seventy Thousand!?! Geez!
I thought I had a lot.
File count of my photo-directory is up to about 35,ooo, largest proportion of which are from Digi-Compact in the last ten years.
But quite a few are scans from my Halide Negs; of which I thought I was pretty prolific, if not particularly proficient, burning about 10-15ooo frames over a period of twenty years or so! That was actually fairly high for halide era, when average person took one film a year!
WHAT DO I DO WITH THEM?
Well, in the film-era, they came in an envelelope; they might get passed around the office, if they'd been taken at an officey type do, or something, but generally, I'd go through them... I used to use tripple print a lot, and I'd sit down with a pair of kitchen scissors and trim off the little 'proof' or wallet sized copies from the edge; ponder the print, possibly crop it down a bit... then either chuck it in the bin, or pop it in an album.
Better ones of the mini-prints, would get blue-tacked to the divider wall around my 'booth' in the mushroom cave... the rest would sit in my desk draw, and I would 'rotate' the display from time to time to aliviate the monotony of office booth tedium.... I mean, there is only SO much amusement to be gained from printing off data-base bumps in reverse text, to drain out the toner cartridges, so that Caffey, the secretary's memo's come out all faint, prompting her to bend over to remove the toner cartridge, then spend ten minutes shaking the cartridge to even out the toner..... while we all watch, google eyed, wondering if THIS time something will pop out.....
This is Caffie... the big hearted, big breasted secretary, here, at play at a collegues kids christening where we got her jiggling her jiggly bits on the bouncy castle.
Unfortunately she is dressed for church... not the office!
Where was I.......
Oh yeah..... lots of prints, usually from family do's would end up given to my mum, gran, who-ever, and a lot would end up in thier family albums, and occasionally the odd one or two would pop up in a frame some-where on a shelf or mantle-piece or hung along the landing, but most would end up in a bottom draw, junk-tub or, and usually eventually, the bin.
However the negs got preserved, and are, working thier way, slowly to Face-Book... like that one of Caffey........ where was I again?
Oh yeah....
There are shelves stacked full of Photo-Albums in my bedroom.... NO-ONE has looked at in a decade or more.
Of the Digi-Archive? Well now... yeah... Face-Book. Family Snaps, old friends, colleges, people you meet on holiday..... they MIGHT at least have a chance to see some of these snaps, if published to the web, and Face-Book.... evil as it is, is the most likely candidate for the job... all my kids are on it; my mum & dad are on it... my aunt & cousins LIVE on it.... so I can post pictures to embarrass them when their mates see I have tagged them in them!
It amuses me, so why not! Better than a picture of my dinner, and a status up date "This is my Tea"
And gets people talking about 'old times' or 'do you remember'.... and lets me surreptitiously note when, and where pictures were taken and re-file them....
Yeah.. thanks, that picture of geeky kid at a church? Yeah, I though that was 1991, and your other cousin, and some-one else Christening... not 1993 at some-one else confirmation!
Isn't digital GREAT embedding 'dates' and other useful data into the picture files!?
But, that's a reletively 'new' thing... O/H got me 'on' to Face book only three years ago.
Before that? Well, I've been using 'Bullatin-Boards' since... well, it seems forever! I was studying IT in the mid 90's, and the first digital pics I ever published were scans of photo's from a summer school..... Oh BOY! Sitting at a 486 PC putting each print into the scanner and waiting half an hour for it to scan, at amazingly low resolution, and having to save each one seperately to an individual floppy disc! Two envelopes of prints, took me a week-end, and filled two packs of fifty floppy discs... I carried the prints out to the car in one hand... came back and (almost) had to use a pallet truck to load the floppy discs in the car! I did NOT at that point see 'the paperless office' every-one was suggesting was just round teh corner, happening in much of a hurry!
Especially as up-loading said scans, one floppy at a time, to the university bulatin board, through a low speed dial up modem connection, HOPING it wouldn't time out on me and would actually upload before the 59minute time out on the connection cut in, took me almost a week of all nighters!
But it got easier... and when I took redundancy in 2000 I treated myself to a propper neg scanner, and two years later when they fell under £100 a digital compact.
It was then, really, when I got the digi-compact I really started uploading; and mainly because I was able to take photo's of stuff people wanted to see, that we were talking about on the, by then, renamed 'Foums'.
I was renovating an old Land-Rover Series III Long wheel-base; and doing jobs on it, making mods and improvements, digi-cam gave me opportunity to take snaps of what I was doing; ask questions, about it or show other people what they could do.
Heading off into the hills in that truck, with a bunch of other nutters of the same mind from the forum we were talking about them on, lead to me posting pics from the outing, for them to look at...
And from a hobby site I had started, mainly to share know-how about my competition trials bike, evolved the site to include more hands-on mechanics and how-to's, and actually shooting pictures specifically to illustrate basic service procedures and stuff, as well as my own 'projects' and outings.
Here you are; a thrilling photo from a photo-how-to on making an engine casing gasket for a motorbike, from an old breakfast cereal packet!
Or slightly more, insprationally, the finished product of my project to over-haul a Rover V8 engine for a Range-Rover.
So, by and large, most of my photo's are shot for a reason, and that reason IS to be web-published; either to Face-Book family Album come scrap-book, or taken specifically to illustrate motor-projects and mechanic's instructional articles, for special interest forums, or my hobby webby; or more random shots taken to help answer specific foum user's questions in a post.
Having that 'reason' for taking a picture in the first-place; whether its to record a family event or outing FOR my family, or whether its to illuistrate a technical article or query, gives a lot of my pictures a reason for being, and a purpose, and people look at them, because they have reason to.
I have hundreds of pictures I took when I got 'in' to SLR photography in the film days; and going through the negs now.... yeah... WHY did I take them!?! What for, even I have no interest in looking at them, really! And nearly ALL of them.... were taken when I picked up the camera, and thought... "What can I take a picture of" rather than having SOMETHING and thinking, "Ah, yeah, be nice/useful to get a picture of this"
