fiberstudio: Filing

Putting stuff back where it belongs is always a challenge. It's much easier to plop it onto a flat surface somewhere and leave it for "sometime". Periodically those flat surfaces, also known as my work table, get so covered with stuff it's impossible to work. And I'm forced to do a clean up, which is a good thing. As long as I don't just move it around, like stirring the pot, which means it all comes back to its original spot. Anyhow, this isn't really about the stuff on my work table, it's about the little basket where I tossed the slides that came back from my show entries, in either a fat or skinny envelope. That basket was full of slides, and since I haven't entered a show with slides in probably about 3 years, one can only surmise how long it's been since I refiled them.

So I emptied the basket and pulled all the slides out of their little sleeves and sorted them. I have notebooks marked by year for slide storage. There is an archive notebook for anything before 1998, then 11 books going from 1998 through 2008. Each quilt has 2 pages of slides since I always shot a full roll of 36 on one quilt. It was easier to have lots of originals than to do one original and then have dupes made. As digital images became more and more prevalent, I began to take them also, but continued to shoot slides. Here is a blog post I wrote when I put in my last order for slide film, in April of 2007. (By the way, I cut up the quilt mentioned in that post.)

Obviously I stopped shooting slides because there are only 2 quilts in my notebook for 2008. It wasn't because I ran out of film because I still have 3 rolls left, stored in the freezer. I would get my slides processed by Fuji, using prepaid mailers. Then Fuji stopped processing their own film and had everybody send them to Dwayne in Parsons, Kansas. If you have Kodachrome slide film, Dwayne's is the only laboratory in the world that still processes it. Kodak stopped producing Kodachrome film last June and if you have some, you had better use it because Dwayne will stop processing it at the end of this year. He will continue to process other types of slide film.

It was always a little apprehensive waiting for slides to come back and wondering if I got the exposure right or didn't see some errant threads that were centered right in the middle of the detail shot. Or if the lab messed up. Several times the film cutter got confused because I shot the quilts on a black background and it couldn't tell where to start cutting. It was was by a machine and it would look for the change in color that signified an image, except in mine that signified the edge of the quilt. That meant the quilt was not centered in the slide and the left edge was cut off. I had to enclose a note that said the image was shot on a black background, please center. Then I figured out a foolproof method - I shot the detail first.

So anyhow, now I'm totally digital and I have a very nice Canon EOS Elan II film camera body that nobody wants. B&H Photovideo sells them for about $80, used of course. This is a camera I think I originally bought for $600. I will take it to the local camera shop and see if they will buy it. Photography students at the local universities often use them.

And slide projectors are becoming scarce also. It's really a dying technology. Someday we will have boxes and boxes of slides and no way to view them. It's really pretty amazing how quickly this change from film to digital has occurred. According to Wikipedia, the first true digital camera that recorded images as a computer file was manufactured in 1988. It took about 10 years for the technology to become readily available and affordable for ordinary consumers, and in 1999 Nikon released its D1, a 2.74 megapixel camera. From then on it was a race to see who could cram the most megapixels into their camera.