2013 Resolution – Time to Get That Personal History Done!

2013 marks the 10 year anniversary of Legacy Multimedia. It will be later this fall and I will commemorate the decade in a fitting manner…. later.

Right now, with the new year, and this huge blank slate of time before me, I want to focus on my new mantra regarding my own personal history, “get ‘er done!” (Since I live in Texas, I can talk to myself in cowboy language.)

Right about the time that I was starting Legacy Multimedia, I also started the long and complex process of digitizing and organizing my own family and my parents’ vast collection of photographs and film. I think I started with dad’s film, transferring some 5 hours of old 8mm film, shot between the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Then I began to focus on my own boxes of film. When I began shooting some time in the early 1980s, I had a huge VHS recorder, the kind that weighed 10 lbs and you had to rest it on your shoulder in order to shoot. Later I downsized to a smaller 8mm tape camera but between the two of them, I transferred some 10 hours of film. After that I started working on scanning and organizing all my old family photographs, most were in albums. And that was when I got sidetracked with my parents’ collection.

Photos were everywhere, all hard copy photographs and negatives, none of them organized in any meaningful way. All thrown into shoe boxes, cardboard boxes, and other ‘storage’ containers spanning some 50 years. I slowly began the task of sorting these out and putting them into collections, organized either by subject or time frame. Then I scanned most of them. At that point, I started to design several hard-cover photo books so that my family could have access to all the photos without having to further degrade the quality of the originals, which were put into archival storage boxes.

Then I found myself on another track. My father, who was a prominent photographer in the late 1940s to early 1950s, had a resurgence of interest in his work; museums and private collectors began paying attention again.

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