What I'm thinking today: Thursday, or Thereabouts

Throwback Thursday?

I note that this fifth day of the week (YES it is the 5th day in my book), has acquired the tag "Throwback". Apparently it's some kind of invitation to post something about one's past. Not to be outdone, I decided yesterday to jump on the bandwagon and make today's post about a 'throwback'.

An afternoon trip to my hair stylist for a long overdue haircut proved to be fruitful ground for ideas. Stories about first haircuts, perms, and colours all piled up in my prompt box of topics, but it wasn't until a client asked about how busy the prom season had been that my Throwback Thursday theme locked into place. Prom, that exciting, scary, wonderful, awful, exhilarating, depressing high school highlight. In my day, in my high school it was simply called "The Formal" and I went to two of them, even better I had pictures; old 35mm slides catalogued and tucked away in metal slide cases all stacked in the hall closet.

In the throes of a sleepless night I mapped out my text. You've just read most of that composition. Somehow it seemed much longer at 3am and far more eloquent. But no matter, I set straight to work at 9am.

Job #1 - find the pictures and scan them to digital. I've done this many times. It takes longer to find the images than scan them.

I opened the 3 ring binder holding the handwritten compendium of all the slides that my love and I have ever taken, all 6,821 of them. I resisted all temptation to marvel at all the other photographic gems from our past and zeroed in on May 1971 and 1972. Slides A0260 to A0264, A0434 and A0435 bore the note, "BCI Formal". The slide box I wanted was at the bottom of the eight others of course, but I managed to haul it out without too many crashes and expletives. I found the cardboard framed images and took a quick look at the them through my Agfa Lupe magnifier aided by sunlight through a kitchen window - somethings never change; isn't that how everyone looks at slides? Somehow the pictures didn't quite look as I remembered them, somehow we didn't look as I remembered us. No time to ponder this one. I was on a roll. It was all of 9:15 when I powered up the scanner and loaded the software.

Three hours later I had my digital images. THREE HOURS? Yup. The software required an update. The update did not load properly the first time round, requiring me to call in my resident techno-wizard. He got around that problem and I tapped the first slide into the scanner then pressed 'scan'. Suffice it to say that the results were not pleasing. Back over to the wizard, who discovered all the settings had changed. With those re-set, slide 1 again disappeared into the scanner. A better image displayed on the screen, but still all was not right. A consultation of the online manual ensued followed by a re-calibration of the scanner, followed by slide 1 again. Success, or rather as good as it was going to get. The rest of the fine tuning would fall to me and the editing software. I scanned the remaining slides, rotated and edited the images in a valiant attempt to coax 2014 digital quality out of 43 year old cellulose, (only 4 photos made it to the final).

Job #2: write the blog.
And it's now 12:55pm.