Friday, February 20, 2009

Discovery No. 1

This has been a week of discoveries. But rather than rant on much too long, I will simply offer you one at a time. So here is my story of Discovery # 1.

This morning, after breakfast, I was putting photos into albums when I found some old negatives and after hopelessly trying to make out the images stored on them, I headed for the trash can.

“Why should I keep these? Someday soon, very soon, I won’t be able to get reprints even if I want to. In fact, that might be the case, already.”

But, as is so often the case, when I get to the trash can, I am forced to halt and reconsider. Maybe not? So I took the negatives back to the kitchen table and spread them out to consider once more if I should stash them or trash them.

Now it just so happens, that as I contemplated the matter, I remembered a little monocle-mini viewer that is more than 50 years old originally intended for viewing slides without a table-top projector. I dug it out. In the box, along with the viewer, were a few old slides mounted in cardboard, so using one as a template, I made a similar frame that I could insert my negatives into.


Then one at a time, with the viewer held up to a sunny window (no batteries or internal light is this piece of plastic), I inserted my negatives into the viewer.

Now I was able to make out the picture details and found several negatives that I should have copies of, but don’t.

Then I got a notion to take my digital camera and apply the lense of it to the eyepiece of the viewer and see if I could take a picture. The picture was clear, but what good is a picture with inverted colors? But I’ll still not trash those pictures. Instead I transferred my digital recreations of the negatives to a Photo Program on the computer and commanded it to ‘invert’ the image.

Voila! The pictures were instantly transformed into images of quality. I printed them off on glossy photo paper and I was amazed. Indeed I was! How amazing is that? Right here in my own space, I can develop negatives into prints without trays, dark rooms, or whatever kind of slop that photographers use. How great is that?




P.S. I thought Hub's cabin was pretty rustic, but obviously it's pretty posh compared to this one.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. That's pretty cool! You are truly clever!

susan@spinning

None said...

That IS awesome. :) Good work, Roberta! Ingenuity strikes again!

Pauline said...

How clever! I think I'd prefer the cabin...

Roberta S said...

Thank you susan, scotia, and pauline for commenting. Obviously I was downright pleased with myself that I could resurrect my old negatives. But that is not all I discovered this week. Discovery No. 2 coming up very
soon!

And yes, Pauline, about the cabin I agree. I don't think I could 'play cabin' in this one, I could only 'play oh-woe-is-me'.

Urban Bella said...

I am astounded by you. Holy crap you're smart.

Roberta S said...

Thanks for visiting Urban Bella. I'm not so smart, I just lucked out with this process. Hub told me not to post it. Said someone would run with it and make zillions. I shrugged, didn't think I cared.

But this morning. God help me. I saw a commercial on TV for a new computer program that does just this. Man, didn't take then long to lap up an idea, did it? ;)

By the way, I totally enjoyed the live blog at your place. Made me feel like we were at the kitchen table having a nice chat. And I did feel confident that such a chat helped a great deal to ease your loneliness (if I may label it that). Hope your dear one gets back real soon.