Memory Lane

When my dad passed away a little over two years ago, he left behind a rather large collection of old slides. Many of them were from his trips abroad with my mother to do research for a number of travel guides that he kept on writing well into his seventies. That was at least the purpose of the trips he declared to the taxman to make the holiday cheaper; clever man! Others were your typical family slides from birthdays, holidays etc. My mother did not know what to do with them, but I had an idea. I wanted to transfer them to digital, i.e. jpegs, to store on a PC. I wanted to make sure they did not just sit in a dark cupboard forever.

So once when I visited my mother, I got the old projector out, selected the family photos and brought it all to Germany. When I got home I dug out my own old slides from “the dark cupboard” and took the whole lot, several hundreds of them, to a photo dealer. It would still be cheaper to let them do it than to buy the machine to convert them to digital myself, according to the guy in the shop.

So now I had a treasure of old slides on my PC, but some of them had not fared well over the years; there were scratches, cracks in the colours, dark spots, minute hairs, fluff and so on. This is where the newly acquired Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (too long to say!) comes in handy. I have started working on some photos, cleaning them up by using mostly the Scratch Remover tool, with stunning effect.

I have also learned how to add watermarks to photos, so I thought I might do that with some of my most precious pictures. The first picture is of my dad when he was not yet forty, I believe. He is standing somewhere on the south coast of England, probably Bournemouth, where he taught English to summer students in the late fifties and early sixties. I think he looks really handsome in his cricket-inspired outfit, and those cool clip-on sunglasses!

The second picture is of yours truly in the late sixties. It was taken at Rödby ferry port in Denmark. My friend and I were on our way down to Frankfurt to surprise my two sisters. My younger sister had travelled to Frankfurt to meet our older sister who was an air-stewardess with Pan Am, and was stationed in Washington D.C. So my friend and I tossed a tent and a few things in the boot of his Ford Anglia (I think), which had a souped-up Ford Cortina GT engine under the bonnet. He had done a few other things to it, which I don’t remember, but was not overly concerned with the exterior. Looking at that picture now I think, was the car small, me big (183 cm) or was it just the angle?

Our first stop-over was Hamburg, where we obviously had to look at the Reeperbahn. There we were pulled into, literally, a bar of some sort, and then quickly thrown out when we said we did not have any money (to speak of). We only wanted to look at this sinful place and were not even used to drinking beer. Sweet innocence! I actually found the postcard I sent from Hamburg to my parents, among my dad’s belongings. OK, I’ll throw that into the blog as well then. I just might tell you later about our continued adventures in Germany. Auf Wiedersehen!