THE LAST COLOR ENTRY

I guess it is appropriate to say my face is Red for not providing more steady and consistent entries. Long senior moment could be the excuse, but I offer none. I am going into another topical seige for viewers; the color stories are dead for the moment. But I did finish the Color book.

I recently purchased a Nikon Coolscan 5000 to recapture quality images from those 3 million 35mm slides that seem to be in everyone's closet or garage. Follow the adventures of how to and how NOT to attack the task. Maybe you will even be encouraged to just chuck your slides in the trash.

Either you, your parents or grandparents took them. Then no one used them for years. The slide projector froze up and nobody could figure out what to do with the slides. When your parents or grandparents died, they usually got pitched because none of the survivors knew what to do with them. Besides, no one was around to figure out, " is this the neighbor that lived next door to us when we lived in the house on Jaworsky Street or is that Grandma's cousin, Betsy, who married that guy that used to put the lampshade on his head after a few drinks?

So, I am doing what my cousin, Sandy, said someone has to do, "to preserve the family history". I will make a career of scanning in the 3 million slides to digitize them onto the computer, then edit using PhotoShop if possible or dumping the useless ones. Yes, I know about saving ALL images and assigning the STAR listings as well as categorizing. Next the images have to be organized into meaningful groups and prepared for entering into Apple's iMovie. This allows creation of a sound track that will let me tell everyone that this is, "Grandma's cousin, Betsy". I can then make a DVD(s) with Ken Burns effects with sound track.

God help me, I actually remember seeing Aunt Betsy's husband with the lampshade on his head, dancing on the table and making a fool of himself at a family picnic on Lake Washington. Even though I was about 9 or 10, I vowed to never take a lampshade away from its precious lampstand; a promise I have kept to this day. Lampshades of the world, you are safe!