I've finished
going through all the CDs and drives I could find, looking for any picture
that might be useful in our Albion Fire Department photo book project. (It's a
book project about the Albion Fire Department … focusing on photos. Pretty
self-explanatory, but I'll look for a catchier title.)
Every photo I
found that had even an outside shot of being useful, I transferred to a file
and then to a thumb drive. I was pretty loose in my definition of
"useful", since Emily can do amazing things with mediocre pictures,
of which I've taken many. Then I totaled them all up.
My file now has
7,792 items, taking up 34.4 gigabytes of space.
This does not
include a whole box full of photos loaned to us by Phil and Cindy Jacob, many
of which Emily is in the process of scanning into her computer. It doesn't include the boxes of prints I have, myself. It also doesn't
include any pictures we may yet have loaned to us by anyone else; it's
just the ones I had immediately available in electronic form.
So … I've got some
sorting to do.
Hopefully we'll get
many more good photos donated toward the project, so I don't have to mess with
my mediocre ones at all. But I have to admit, I had a lot of fun going through
all those files. I've pretty much mastered a complete lack of organization, so
I had to go through all my boxes of CDs … music, pictures, backups, documents,
everything. I kept saying, "Hey--I remember that!"
I also
transferred, to a different file, hundreds of my old humor columns, dating back
to between 2000-2004. Basically fourteen to eighteen year old columns, which
means many of my readers have never seen them, and the rest have probably
forgotten. A project for later this year: Adapt and assemble them into a new
book, which I've tentatively titled "Still Slightly Off the Mark".
An easy project in
theory, but I'll probably rewrite them, since I'm theoretically better for
having a decade and a half more writing experience. What do you think? Do we
all need a laugh?
I think so, too.
 |
| Old photos--or in this case, video scans--do my heart good. |
That sounds like it's going to keep you exceedingly busy for quite some time.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's just what I do!
DeleteYe gods, what a project. All that work and the upcoming chores wears me out. It's so much easier to write what my characters are telling me. At least you seem to enjoy the grind.
ReplyDeleteWell, I enjoy looking through the pictures! Now comes the hard part: layout.
DeleteWhen I first conceived the idea I thought it would be a little faster than usual, because I wouldn't have to do much writing. But I have to caption the photos and such, so ... probably longer.