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Tag Archives: archival
The quality of slide scans
Photo slides had completely disappeared off my radar until early 2008 when my father brought them over — along with a slide scanner he couldn’t figure out how to operate. I knew that someday I would revisit them with my trusty old Epson Perfection 3490 Photo flatbed scanner. What follows are my thoughts and experiences on the matter. Brace for impact! Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged advice, archival, digitization, digitizing old photos, experiences, history, memories, personal, projects, scanning, time
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Photo restoration through AI? Nope!
Despite the recent incredible developments in artificial intelligence and image generation, I remain steadfast that AI still has no role in the workflow for digitising personal snapshots on prints, slides or negatives. While I obviously made basic edits like cropping, or adjusting brightness, contrast, white balance and colours so that the viewer can actually see what’s going on in a photo, my experiences with AI services (read: face enhancing) have done nothing but confirm a phenomenon that’s already been termed “identity shift”. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged AI, AI photo enhancement, archival, art, digitization, facial recognition, man-machine, memories, restoration, surveillance
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Webris, netsam and the demise of Flash
“Webris and netsam” is a term I use to describe material and debris left over by internet-related tasks — you know, the kind of stuff you download during a specific project and hold on to in case you might need it later or because it’s too good to delete. Continue reading
Posted in Internet
Tagged archival, flash, fun, images, junk, obsolete, software, web design
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It’s all on video
I’ve recently been clearing out a bunch of old video clips. The early web was home to many weirdos, and videos of the kind didn’t help its reputation. Continue reading
Posted in Internet
Tagged archival, collections, funny, internet culture, murder-death-kill, software preservation, WWW, YouTube
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2014: A look ahead
Last year we moved house. While packing you tend to discover a shitload of forgotten items that you didn’t know you (still) had, and then you’re faced with the decision, “do I box it, or do I bin it?” Continue reading
The Archivist’s Dilemma
I am a collector because I collect a particular kind of cassette. I am an archivist because I disseminate and publish facts and data which future generations might find useful. The (meta)data ends up in a database called Discogs. Scans end up in my personal stash, and the cassettes end up in the trash. Nobody wants those, they’re just plastic matter. But what of the audio on those tapes, the gist of it all? Let corporate greed ensure that the majority of “European” recordings will survive for future generations to gush over. Continue reading