Family photos rediscovered

I stood in for Mthr Frances at the St Catherine's Eucharist this morning as she had a funeral time clash. Nine of us were present, and we had another lively conversation over coffee afterwards. I dropped my quarterly prescription renewal form into the surgery, a little later than planned, as I run out on Sunday. After lunch, I collected groceries from Beanfreaks, bought some cans for the food bank collection then went for a short walk around the park as it was starting to get dark. When I got back, I wrote a reflection on next Thursday's Gospel ready for recording.

In the evening I revived my 12 year old desktop Windows Vista PC to drive my photo negative scanner, as there's a jumbled pile of negatives to digitze and then get rid of, in a modest clutter clearance effort. I was quite impressed at how quickly this old machine booted up and worked smoothly, despite having to reset the system clock as its CMOS battery is as dead as a dodo. It no longer needs to rely on connecting to the internet to provide a useful service, so its speed reflects a world where antivirus software, internet security and other device slowing measures are no longer required to make it a functioning tool. What have we done to ourselves?

One assorted batch of negatives were probably taken by my sister June, both in London and Geneva, at times when I was beardless or had cropped hair. The other batch are of a family holiday in Provence when we had a wonderful Bedford motor caravan to take us on holidays to France and Switzerland in the late eighties. Two odd photos are of Kath and Rachel one Christmas before Owain was born. For the first time I used the Windows 10 photo editing app, not only for cropping pictures but also trying out its light and colour image enhancements. It's simple, but effective, making a difference when working on scanned images from another era when the film cameras i used weren't expenside or sophisticated and mu ability to get the best out them not all that developed.

There are scores more negatives to scan so I'll leave the kit ready to switch on for a while, in the hope of a few spare hours to finish an amazingly time consuming trawl into family photos..