So I find myself in a dilema...or at least, until last night, I did.
I've been going through a lot of old albums since my mother passed away last year. Honestly, this trip down memory lane began at least a year or two ago, and came about in an attempt to connect with my childhood Walt Disney World memories. I dug up what photographic proof of my early bliss at the parks, and it made me happy.
These photos and memories took on a whole different significance after my mom passed away. The hours/day after she died were spent by me going through all of the albums in the front closet of her house. It was my immediately way to cope, I was not only reliving beautiful memories (which is what she wanted...she was very against sad wakes and everyone being sad) but also had something constructive to do, as I was going through these photo albums and loose photographs and sorting them.
I came upon the realization that I needed to have all of these photos scanned. I'd given it thought before, but the daunting task of digitizing thousands of photos always dissuaded me from taking it seriously. It still pushes me away. First off, the expense. There's a lot of photographs in here, and I don't really want to pick and choose...especially since I want to do this for the rest of my family as well, and there are tons of photos of all of the family in there. Second issue, is the quality of the scans. I've heard horror stories of getting tons of photos scanned by a company, and they ended up doing crappy auto-exposure corrects on them, or did a poor job of scratch and dust removal.
The third and biggest issue for me is the fact that these photo albums were not just a random collection of photos thrown into an album, but in many cases pieces of art, excellent displays of scrapbooking before scrapbooking was even anything popular. In short, these are the only tangible creations that I can remember my mother by. Sure...we have the memories. We have myself and my brother. We have all of the people she made smile in her life. We have all of those things to remember her by. But there's just something about having something to hold...something you've grown up with...that just makes such a strong impact...and this is it for me.
So if I were to take the photos out of the albums to photograph, a few things would happen. It would obviously be a much more intense and arduous process than just scanning the photos themselves. I tried to scan the pages but that didn't really work too well, the plastic sheet that protects the photos distorts the image a bit and the scanner light reflects off it. Another issue is that, with the older albums, once you unstick the plastic from the photos, the album pretty much falls apart. These things are 30 years old in some cases.
What I've decided upon doing is this: for starters, I set up a little rig to take photos of the albums open, so I can have a record of what they looked like. It's not perfect, I don't have the gear or the knowhow to make it look great and without some flash flare. But it will serve the purpose of having something to see thats a copy of the album. Then, I will have to take the albums apart and take all the photos out. I tried taking them out 2 pages at a time, scanning, and putting them back in, but it takes way too long and with the older albums just does not work.
I will be doing a few of the albums I have on hand, BY hand...that is to say, by myself and not some outside company. The dust/scratch aspect has me a bit worries, so I think I'm gonna keep that to a minimum. I will have to get the rest of the albums from storage and pick out the ones I want to photograph. Then destroy the rest as i de-photo them and send them off to be scanned in mass.
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