Over the weekend, something unforeseen happened, one thing led to another, and I ended up taking pictures of old pictures.  I had wanted to scan the negatives of these pictures, but I have not had the time to do so.  In this case, my brother-in-law asked me for some old pictures of my wife, as well as any pictures I had of his youngest brother.  It’s not really a long story, I just don’t want to go into it.

The task ended up as a group effort between me and my kids.  I asked my son to take the pictures, while me and my daughter filtered through the loose pictures and albums.

I was not feeling up to it, but as there was some need for urgency, I had to plow through.  We did have fun though.  And my son did learn a thing or two about taking pictures of pictures.  Truth is, given the time, I would have opted for a scan of the pictures.  But my scanner is a ten year old machine which doesn’t scan fast enough.  Hence the only alternative was to take pictures.

My son started out with the pictures on the desk and him hovering above the pictures.  Problem was the lighting.  We were just using the regular room lights.  No use for flash as that would wash out the picture.  He had to move to where there was brighter lighting.  After a while he was still slowly edging his way through his task.  He was holding the camera and not using the tripod.  This resulted in blurred pictures, besides taking a long time doing and redoing the pictures.

At that point I substituted for him, in as much as we were already done through choosing which pictures to shoot.  I got the tripod out, experimented a bit with the distance, and started shooting away.  I wasn’t able to shoot all the pictures we chose.  This was because of various reasons, including the contrast of the photos, the glare from the lights, some folding of the pictures, and the slight but very discernible slant for most of the pictures. But I was able to shoot the pictures almost like an assembly line manner:  set the picture, set the aperture, shoot, and cycle.

It was a good drill all in all.  But I guess I should really start on that project of scanning all the pictures using the negatives, if possible.  That would have to be for another day.