Aticle by Betsy Bowen
Stacks, drawers, boxes, albums — all full of photographs. Each photograph has a significant meaning, capturing a time, place or person that we wanted to remember. Today we have an abundance of photographs on our home computers, because of time restraints many find a home on our hard drives, never seeing the light of day!
Over the years your hard copies of photos will fade; that’s just one of the reasons it is important to preserve your photographs. Oftentimes we don’t realize how precious these photographs are until disaster hits — flooded basements, fire, humidity — nature’s elements are not always kind to our photographs. When a natural disaster hits you can replace most of the items you lose in your home; the one thing you cannot replace is your photographs, your memories.
The importance of scanning and preserving our photographs can been seen in the faces of those who lost all their photos in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Iowa, and the California fires, among others. I remember watching countless interviews on television, countless individuals reliving their experiences; more often than not they mentioned they lost all their photographs.
There are many solutions for preserving your photos. You can hire a service; there is an abundance of companies on the Internet that offer this type of service. Most charge by the photograph and the DPI (dots per inch) resolution. Or you can buy a scanner and start scanning. The upside is you will save money when you buy your own scanner; downside is this is an extremely time consuming process.
Once your photographs are scanned and placed in the proper folders, burn your photos to CDs. I suggest that you make several copies of the CDs — keep one for yourself, send one to a friend or family member in another state for safekeeping, and put one in a fireproof box.
When I scan my photographs in 300-600 dpi, it usually takes about an hour to do 60 photographs. I then open up Photoshop and start enhancing each of the photos by restoring color, removing red eye and any blemishes on the photograph. This is very time-consuming, but it is all part of the process.
If you would like any more information you can email Betsy Bowen at dvdsbybetsy@yahoo.com.
