Memories

Something neither Karen or I had the opportunity to deal with in the time it deserved before our house move was photographs. We, as many of us I assume, have a plethora of snaps documenting our lives before the digital age (which presents a different problem in itself). Not only our lives together but family photographs that span generations in my case having inherited when my parents passed.

We carried at least a dozen large cardboard boxes of said photographs from Nethermill. Some catalogued, some with scrawls on the back, some in albums that give a hint to the date that the photograph was taken. A constant theme to many of the photographs however, is that I do not recognise the subject whether person, place or a random tree that looked particularly photogenic on a given day.

There are a small selection of photos that I hold really dear but I estimate they number a percentage in single figures and I have now set about the process of converting them to digital image so I no longer have to keep the physical form. It’s been great to relive memories of childhood and laugh at images of myself that are comedy gold!

On to the digital images themselves, with that age came the opportunity to take hundreds, thousands of images in search of that great shot. Indeed, I was once told by a professional photographer friend, that the work was not in taking the multitude of photos but in down selecting the better images and deleting the remainder. The thousands of images I did take, what didn’t happen was the administration of those images that should have been deleted years ago and I’m now paying for.

Hopefully, at the end of this process I will have a full catalogue of digitised images that don’t gather dust and are viewed again and again. A collection small enough to be viewed more than once every 20 years but big enough to hold all of the precious times. The hope being that when they are inherited by the kids they will open the folder with the same delight as I have had over the last week without the frustration of playing guess that face / castle / tree that the album suggested I would have known in 1978.

c1973 Andy on donkey, possibly at Bridlington (or maybe Blackpool?)