The end of the slides... era!

Yesterday was clean-up day and we worked inside our little garden shack reorganizing the mess I've been so good at creating over the past few years. I first sorted out a multitude of pieces of wood, trim, shelving, you name it, and then I starred at my slide collection. For those of you who only know digital photography, there was a time - not so long ago - when pictures were stored on 35 mm slides.

So until a day ago, I was still the proud owner of some two thousand such items that I had finally digitized four years ago, and discovered in the process that many of them were already badly faded or discolored. Well, when I saw them all lined-up in their original Kodak boxes that contained the once-high-tech plastic carousel, I delicately placed the whole collection inside my wheelbarrow before dumping it unceremoniously inside our large garbage can.

I can only hope that its re-incarnation under the quite virtual form of jpeg or jpg files (which by the way, stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group”) will last at least as long as these venerable slides have since some of their oldest specimen were well into their forties! I must confess that had a tinge of nostalgia and felt a bit guilty as I watched these little guys tumble into a horrible and wide open garbage can...