Photo Mania

 

Sunday, April 1, 2012 – Photo Mania

My latest project is related to the most highly anticipated event of the year – Elliott’s 100^th birthday on May 25.  The big celebration will take place over the Memorial Day weekend.  Right now, I’m assembling photographs to use in a slideshow about Elliott’s life.  My iPhoto session at the Apple Store helped me better organize the hundreds of digital images that I’ve accumulated over the past few years.  Since I’m the official photographer in the family, there are plenty of images of Elliott.  Whether he’s celebrating Thanksgiving, blowing out birthday candles, eating gelato in Italy, or sitting in a park in Barcelona, he’s always so photogenic!  Selecting the digital photos for the slideshow was the easy part of the project.  But I didn’t start using a digital camera until the end of 2007. 

Finding pictures from the pre-digital age has been much more time-consuming.  I’ve had to search throughout the house, in closets, in unmarked boxes, in drawers, and in dusty photo albums for pictures that hadn’t seen the light of day in decades.  I stayed up until late at night marveling at long-lost photos that chronicle our courtship, our wedding in Boston, our life in France, the births of Elisa and Matt, and our move to Virginia.  Some photos were faded or stuck together, but most were fairly well preserved.  As I sorted through glossy snapshots, I relived our visits with friends and family throughout the United States as well as our travels to far-flung corners of the world such as England, Costa Rica, and Russia.  In addition to the photos that I took, there are plenty of very old black and white photos of Elliott’s family from much earlier times.  In many cases, the photo quality isn’t very good and there’s no information on the back of the photo.  Elliott has had to help me identify people in some of them.  I’ve made a lot of progress.  There are stacks of sorted photos everywhere, but there’s still a big unsorted pile on the floor of the guest room.  After I label the non-digital photos I want to include in the slideshow, I’ll have to get them scanned and imported into iPhoto.  That’s my goal for the coming week.