02 July 2009

Old slides




On the day of my wedding (February 2009), my dad gave me a shopping bag full of slides. Originally I had asked him to bring down some boxes of slides he bought in Hong Kong in 1984, which I used to enjoy looking at as a wee tyke - I thought it'd be fun to have a look, but mostly I wanted the tiny plastic projector he bought with them. However, somewhere along the line he also dug up another, much larger, and far more important box of slides.

You see, the slides were taken by my great grandfather, and feature images of my dad & his family in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Unfortunately I lack a projector to view them large (dad forgot to bring this down), and my flatbed scanner just doesn't cut it. The above images were attempts to scan with a flatbed - not totally flash, but a start.

These are probably some of the few images in existence of my dad as a child. Photography wasn't a huge part of nan & pop's lives when their kids were growing up.

It's nice to have a photographic link to the past. Dad says his nan & pop (ie. my great grandparents) used to go for a Sunday drive with their grandkids quite regularly. In fact the first slide I looked at I instantly recognised as a view of the Great Western Tiers from the Bracknell area. I hope to find a few more gems when I get them scanned (whether I buy a cheap neg scanner & do this myself, or have them done by the local photo chain, I haven't decided).

2 comments:

henny said...

At least you have some of their young years to see. I'll never be able to see my mom and dad when they were very young. Photography was a luxury. It's not until my dad was about 20 that he was photographed :).
And we moved a lot, some of our family photos were gone.

smudgeon said...

It is wonderful to finally have some images. The idea of not having a camera with me to record such events & moments brings me out in a cold sweat!