From the archive

 Taken about 25 years ago during a winter camp at Shorne Woods country park.

40 Years ago

 Just using this to show what I was doing 40 years ago.

Living and working near Liverpool and getting into some really fun locations.

10 and 20 years ago

 Spring was in the air 10 years ago and 20 years ago.

Archives and Space

One of things I'm starting to look is my photo archive.

Having photographs that I have shot, going back more than 50 years, plus all the family archives that now stretch back well over a hundred years I am running into a problem of space and what to do about the future.

It is hard to count how much I have but at a very conservative guess over three quarters of a million images.

It was brought home to me strongly today when I opened an archive box. The contents are over 5000 slides that are spares from early shoots.

No idea what exactly is here. Many will go straight out but even a quick check shows there are lots of pictures of the family, houses and cars that I don't have anywhere else. 

I also tried to do a list of how many different formats I have stored. At a rough count I recon that there are nearly 80 different film formats counting, colour and B+W and slides. Plus all the polaroid formats. Ranging in size from 110 to 10"x8". Plus digital and some video and a bit of audio. 

Archives

I brought a large box of pictures from Mums house when I cam back south this week. This afternoon I went through them to try and get rid of some of the images that hold no interest to the family.

Many pictures I had taken and sent to my parents so they had pictures of the children when they were growing up. But one picture caught my eye. This is the last picture taken of me and my father.

We would have been up on holiday in the lats summer and were packing the car for the drive south. Daughter would be 10 month old and it was hugs and goodbyes. then we had no idea that it would be the last time we would be together.

It looks as though we are arguing but it just a fleeting expression on my father's face.

1970's snow and fog

At the moment I am going through my collection of B&W film negs and getting them digitised. This is all being done by camera, so the files while large are not as good as scans. The big advantage is that it is much faster. I am able to copy 5 or 6 rolls per hour.


Lots of the images are not very interesting but occasionally I find something worth working on in photoshop.

One roll I found was of a snowy and foggy day down by the river near home. It must have been about 1976 or 7 but as I never noted any info on these rolls that is just a bit of a guess.

Data

Ever wondered what 534 CDs and DVDs looks like?

This is my 'office copy' of all my images. Originally I had done a second copy that I stored off site. The off site copies had gone a few years ago, but I had never got around to getting rid of the office copies. They were on a shelf units, on top of a filling cabinet and in the box in the picture. 

Starting from 2001 there were 329 CDs. Then I moved onto DVDs, all 205 of them. I stopped writing to DVD in February 2011, after that I have shot around another 400 GB of data which went straight to hard drive.

Over the next few weeks I will go through all the disks checking I got all the data from the offsite set when I wrote them back to hard drives. Then each disc will be cracked to render them unreadable and sent of to the dump. any plastic and paper that can be recycled, will be.

Should keep me busy for a while!