Fiddling with Images

My husband and me in 1958. Both playing in the sand, but not together. Not yet.

I fiddled with some Super 8, on DVD. I am told that originally Super 8 movies were extremely clear, but the ones I have of me are somewhat faded. My Aunt Flo took them. My husband has some, taken by cousins, that are clearer. They were stored in a better place, I guess.

Funny, my husband and I have quite a lot of video of our kids when younger, but none when older, as in their teens. They stopped being cute and just got annoying!

I dressed up the picture of Marion in her white dress, surrounding her in red with Corel, and printed it out on glossy paper and put it on the wall in the dining room. (I’m redecorating a bit and felt the room needed a note of colour. Then I forgot to save the picture on my computer. Oh, well.

I like this picture, which I originallly I scanned from the Nicholson Album and turned it into an “Impressionst Print” in Photoshop.

Now this picture of Marion was from scnned from a teeny tiny, say 2 inch by 1 inch photo and she was just sitting in the corner of the frame. Hardly noticeable. It was a tea party photo.

So an obscure little image, taken around 1910, by a Kodak camera purchased in 1895 or around (forgot the date) and hidden in an old album in a drawer for decades is now the main image, or iconic image of my Tighsolas website. And it’s on my dining room wall. I like it best of all the Tighsolas photos.

There she is in the photo in the upper right hand corner.

I wonder what my great grandchildren will be able to do with my image. Probably make it come alive, in 3-D or a hologram.

No doubt actually. I just wonder if they’ll bother.

If I were an actor today, I’d be having my descendants sign contracts to keep them from selling my image for commercial purposes.

Gone with the Windows

This is a picture from the Nicholson collection, although it was not in an album.

Well, a while back I wrote an essay for the Toronto Globe and Mail titled Gone with the Windows, about the ephemeral nature of digital images. I wondered if all the images being taken and posted on websites, etc. today, would last as long as pictures in the Nicholson collection.

As I write this novel, Flo in the City, about a young woman coming of age in the exciting 1908-1913 era, based on the real life of Flora Nicholson, and the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/, I find myself re-thinking this.

I spent a good part of the day going through the old photos that I used to post Tighsolas, because, well, I had seriously misplaced them.

Some of them anyway.

These pictures spent 50 years at Tighsolas in and old trunk in Richmond and another 50 in Hudson Quebec, in the basement at my in-laws’ and then I get a hold of them, spend 5 years playing around with them while posting a website and lose some of them.

Not only that I’ve lost of some my own family photos this way. I digitize them, then the computer the jpgs are on gets tossed and I may or may not save them on disk, but eventually, well, they are lost, too.

I don’t know what the answer is to this, except to be meticulous in my archiving, which would be against my nature. Is that a good excuse or what?

Anyway, I posted this picture because, well, it’s different. I had seen it floating around in the Nicholson pile of memorabilia but had lost it. Then, while I was looking for some of my own family photos, it slipped out of an album, so I digitized it and posted it here, forever, or until there’s a serious solar flare.

This story Flo in the City shows that when it comes to history, some things change and some things stay the same. Apparently, women kissed on the mouth, before 1900. I know, because also among the Nicholson memorabilia I found a newspaper article insisting that this custom should end.

Funny, you never see women kissing in old movies, Westerns and such. Not in the G-rated Westerns, anyway. Anyway, I have to write that scene with Marion and Edith at home, discussing their love lives from their points of view.

Lucky, I have that diary from 1907 that is really just a dating diary. One thing that hasn’t changed in 100 years, young women.