About the website/project
This project started in the summer of 2015 when I saw 4 boxes of slides dumped on a house clearance stall at Ashton Market (Ashton-under-Lyne). I looked through the wide range of slides (approx 1200) and was especially intrigued by the dates that the slides covered (between 1969-1972). My interest was definitely piqued and the boxes were purchased!
Two of the boxes covered the visits around Britain, another box was just full of slides from trips to Italy and the fourth had a smattering of other European countries.
The original photographer had obviously spent a lot of time travelling around Britain and Europe in these years and had taken lots (and lots!) of pictures. They had also, in certain locations, bought the official tourist slides (instead of postcards) and these were also included in the boxes.
I thought, quite naively, that I will scan them all in and preserve them for future generations!
The menus at the top of this site will show you how far I’ve got with the slides so far – aka that’s mostly one of the Britain boxes done.
First steps forwards … and then backwards
In early 2016, I took the first box of the three to my partner’s house as I was ‘house-sitting’ whilst she was having double-glazing installed. I got about 80 or so slides done, but each and every one had a line across the top-left of the scanned image.
I didn’t really notice it until I was looking at some Austrian scenery and thinking why the same ‘telephone line’ was appearing in each slide, such as the following example scan shows:
D’oh! There was a slight crack in the glass in the scanner. That crack was causing this line to appear in every scan. Having done the initial batch of 80 or so slides, and all of them with the same line on them, I realised that I would have to contact 7DayShop.
The contact was made and, after sending example images and the scanner back to 7DayShop, I received a newer model and started again.
Progress
Up until early 2017, I hadn’t made as much progress as I would like, mainly due to an addiction to Xbox One games.. What’s already on this site have been scanned in, uploaded, then removed, then shrunk, then edited and straightened out (using Picasa) and re-uploaded again!
However, in March 2017, I was helping my partner have a bit of a tidy up and, stupidly, threw a broken lid from a large plastic box down the stairs. “I’ll pick that up in a bit”, I thought. But I then ‘found’ the lid about 4 minutes later, as I was walking down the same set of stairs whilst holding a large bin bag of clothes.
Cue a trip to A & E and an ankle in plaster. During my recovery time, which had to be at my partner’s house (she has less stairs to climb up than I do at my place), I caught up with a lot of the scanning / image processing for most of the slides in the ‘Britain’ box. That is one box down, three more to go…
Current Progress
Roll forward to early 2019 and a restart of the process is due. I am working away from home and sat twiddling my thumbs in a B & B 4-5 nights a week. So I’ll be dusting down the slide scanner and bringing one of the boxes back with me and getting as many slides done as I can.
The downside to the B & B is that the broadband speeds are slooooow. So I’ll do the bulk uploading when I get back home at weekends 🙂