Marcy photos
I recently bought a photo to digital converter. It's basically a digital camera in a box; you slide the print into it, you push the button, and a digital photo appears on your computer.
Unfortunately, it's not great. It's Windows-only; it's a large plastic box that appears to be mostly empty, making it feel flimsy and cheap; the software isn't very intuitive. But it does create digital versions of photos.
I'm hoping to send a bunch of irreplaceable old family photos to a professional photo digitizing service, probably DigMyPics. But before I do that, I'd like to do a quick cheap scan of the most important ones, just in case.
Anyway, I figured Mother's Day would be a good time to scan and post some photos of my mother, Marcy, but the weekend kind of got away from me. So I'm posting a couple days late.
I scanned these as high resolution TIFFs, but then made smaller and lower-quality JPG versions to post here. Apologies for the poor layout to those of you reading this in LJ or Facebook or RSS readers; I have CSS to do reasonably nice photo placement in my blog, but of course it doesn't carry over into other contexts.
The first one in this entry, of her in a chair with sunlight in her hair, is one I've posted before, and one of my favorites of her. It was taken in May or August of 1980, according to the note on the back of the printed photo, so only a few months before she died. I don't remember how I got this electronic version (maybe from Jay?), but it was long before I had this scanner/digitizer. I've now scanned the photo again to compare versions; but the digitizer version (which I'm not posting) is nowhere near as nice as the version I'm posting in this entry.
The second one here (leaning on the post) may be my very favorite photo of her, and I never knew it existed until, what, this past fall? I think that was when our cousins gave us a box of family photos we'd never seen before. This one was taken July 26, 1971, at my father's parents' house in Tacoma, at the top of the stairs. So I was about 3 years old at the time, and Jay was about 17 months.
The next one (head tilted, white shirt) is another one I quite like and that I had never seen before. There's no date on that one.
And this last one, with our dog, is not a great photo of her, but I had it handy so went ahead and digitized it. The back says it was taken in 1980 too, but that seems unlikely to me; I think that's our front yard at the duplex we lived in in Cotati, before we moved to Palo Alto in 1978 or so. But I could be wrong.
There's one other photo of her that I particularly like, from high school, but I think the only copy of that that I have is too big to fit in the scanner.
I've also posted full-size copies of the two black-and-white ones to a new web album.
