One thing - or rather, one drawer of things - that I've been carting about with me through the years are negatives. (I'm realizing as I write this, that it is also metaphorically true, but I mean it in the literal sense of ye olde fashioned photo negatives.) Are they heavy? No. Are they bulky? Not unbearably so. But they are useless to me in their current form, and they do carry a kind of negative emotional charge because I just don't know what's on them and I've been afraid to get rid of any of them and lose the ability to make new prints of some deeply significant memory or scene.
Trapped, eh? There are two easy ways out of this trap. Option A: I could simply throw them out, losing them as surely as if some apocalyptic hand had snatched them from me. Because of course if they were destroyed by some natural or man-made disaster, I'd certainly be able to go on (just a little bit freer). Option B: I could send them to some outfit that claims to be able to read the negatives and put them on digital media for me.
Since this is my year of spending dangerously, I went with Option B. I sent a few hundred negative frames to some folks in Utah, and they sent me back a link to low-resolution images so I can organize and delete them as desired. So I just spent most** of my train ride sorting through the images. Their organizing tool doesn't like the Safari browser, but it looked like it was working well enough for my purposes. I lumped them into 6 folders -- to the extent that I like the high-resolution images, I'll be able, perhaps, to make finer distinctions. A few of the photos I recognized as favorites that I'd really like to keep. Most are not that interesting.
Once I see the final result, I'll decide whether I want to go through the same Option B process for the rest of my photo negatives... or whether I'll go with Option A for some or even all of the remaining ones.
Either way, it feels good to make progress in this area. And I'm not going to load all of them into iPhoto -- only the great ones.
FN* Of course, I've also bought a bunch of stuff, some of it intended to help me organize and streamline. You know you're buying too many new things when the delivery guys start assuming that random stuff that other people have ordered is yours.
FN** Once the Acela Wi Fi finally started working instead of stranding me in an endless loop with the Terms & Conditions page, that is. Grrr.
Author's Note: LeesMyth sincerely regrets the grating grammatical error in the first sentence of the second paragraph. The subject/verb agreement is completely off. Unfortunately, I could not use the sentence structure I wanted to use without choosing between something that sounds right or something that "is" right but sounds completely wrong. Readers are advised that comments relating to the sentence structure and grammatical choice will be ruthlessly ignored - unless they are very, very funny. Consider yourself warned.
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