After some false starts I've re-commenced scanning my Mother's old Kodachrome slides – images taken in the 60's and 70's with a Kodak 126 Instamatic camera that I previously blogged about here. In between I've had numerous hardware and software issues with my PC, most recently a boot sector virus that prompted me to through out the old XP dinosaur and buy a Windows 7 dinosaur to replace it. Setting up a new computer is always time consuming and this was no different – the key challenge being finding a Windows 7 driver for my Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 slide scanner.
With a driver duly located off the web – Nikon no longer support the Super Coolscan 5000 – I was back in business. The chief problem is that the cardboard slide mounts for the Kodachrome slides keep catching on one another in the SF-210 slide feeder so I'm pretty much down to a slide-by-slide scan.
Looking at the slides I wonder how my Mother felt upon receiving them back from the lab. Although some of the colors have faded – they've not been well stored over the years – most of the slides from the 60's seem to suffer from camera shake or poor exposure. Given the camera hardware and the way my Mother used to hold the camera, this isn't really surprising looking back. Here is one of the better images from 1967. On the left is my brother, George (age 6), my sister, Ann (age 9), the rather dapper fellow is my cousin Clive and in front is myself (age 4).
We didn't have a projector and screen to view them on, rather we had a battery operated slide viewer that illuminated the slide by means of a flashlight bulb behind a diffuser and had a large magnifying glass the front to enlarge the image. Even so, I can't help thinking now that my Mother must have been terribly disappointed when she first viewed the slides. That said, I've no recollection she ever displayed disappointment. Maybe she edited the ones she showed to us children, maybe she showed them all to us and we were in such awe that we didn't notice the flaws.
The key thing here for me, though, is that despite the high miss rate, my Mother doesn't appear to have become discouraged. She kept on taking slides with the Instamatic all the way through 1980. So far I'm up to 1970 and her batting average appears to be improving. Maybe she replaced the camera and the replacement had a slightly better fixed-focus lens, or maybe she got better at holding the camera.[ad name=”post”]
With the digital cameras of today, one can see near instantly if the shot was OK – if not on the back of the camera then as soon as uploaded to the computer – and there's no real impediment to taking a bazillion shots to make sure you haven't cut off the heads or the feet. Back then, as a family snapshot shooter, you looked through the viewfinder, largely unaware of the problem of parallax, framed and pressed the shutter, hoping the limited focus and exposure choices you had selected were good. Film was expensive so you only took one or two images. When the film was complete you mailed if off and waited for the pictures to come back.
Consequently I've no idea when my Mother took the image above, other than prior to October 1967 when Kodak processed it. I'm sure my Mother was happy with this shot. As for some of the others in the box, I wonder if she kept them solely because they were the only image she had of the event.
I'm extremely grateful that my mother took these images, and I'm grateful that she was endowed with the character to persevere, even though I'm sure many of the results were somewhat less than she had hoped for. This relative handful of images serves to remind me of the good times I had growing up and also provides a nice counterpoint to my own children at these same ages and how the world has changed in the intervening years.
My mother is now 81. Her mind is fading so she can no longer operate a computer. She loved taking pictures but as it gets ever harder and ever more expensive to pursue film photography, her output has tailed off these last few years. And yet for my Mother, the camera has turned full circle – the most available film cameras these days being those fixed-focus disposable point-and-shoot cameras, so very similar to that early Instamatic.
So Happy Mother's Day, Mum, and thanks for all the memories you captured and the ones yet to come.
