It’s March 2023, and it’s been about one year since I started digitising my photo collection.
Once I established a proper workflow, the task of scanning slides, negatives, and photo prints was a surprisingly quick — albeit tedious — process (and I will be writing a few words about that another time). What I hadn’t counted on was the amount of time that researching, naming, and sorting of the resultant scans would ultimately take. I will certainly be writing a few words about each of these aspects, too (time permitting).
As a matter of fact, I’m still busy sorting though scanned photos now.
It’s shocking to realise that I have more (digital) pictures of a puppy I sold last year than of my own mother’s entire lifetime!
While most snaps have now found a home in a rearranged folder scheme, there’s also a stack of vernacular garbage getting deleted because it’s lost all meaning and relevance (which I have written about before).
On the other hand there are also some wonderful photographs among the family stash of slides and negatives which, although I have no personal relationship with the captured moments and they therefore have no place in my (digital) photo album, are good enough to keep for their own sake.
Then there are others such as those my father took in the early seventies during the construction of the Cabora Bassa hydroelectric power scheme which may hold some historical or geopolitical interest to other people.
These will probably end up on Wikimedia Commons whereas other photos of public interest may find refuge at Google Places. Flickr, too, seems worth returning to, and there’s an assemblage of new material for the Human Clock.
This stuff can keep a man way too occupied. That’s all for now.
Photos via Herbert Hönigsperger Snr.
