June 28, 2005
My (kinda) New Toy
Armed 
with my trusty new scanner that has the ability to scan negatives and slides as well, I've been spending the past few nights scanning away. Well okay, it's not that new - I bought it a couple of months back and it took me 3 weeks to get it out of the box, and even then I wouldn't have taken it out of the box had it not been for my cousin, who needed me to scan some documents for him. That's just the way I am; this explains why I have a closet full of new clothes but I persist in wearing my old ones. Because the new clothes are NEW and if I wear them then they won't be NEW anymore.
But the point is, I now have a scanner which I have begun to use in a serious manner, and along with the scanning I've started Photoshopping my photos as well. Nothing fancy; just some adjusting of levels, color balances, brightness and contrast.
The scanning is a pain in the ass though, since it takes almost 25 minutes to scan one negative strip of 6 photos. I started off scanning at 600 dpi, which took about 35 minutes and left me with photos that are 24MB in size; I've since cut it down to 400 dpi with photos that are 11MB in size. Yeah I know it's large, but these are the raw photos which I then burn onto CDs for safekeeping. The scanning takes so long and sucks up so much of my computer memory that it's almost impossible to do anything else except play some Spider Solitaire or read blogs while I wait. I even came up with a song while waiting (click below for the lyrics)...
So, expect to see more photos soon. E.g. the Mauritius trip that I took a year ago.
I feel so... enabled, technology-wise. Welcome to the 21st century. Now, if I can just photoshop away my tummy, that would be perfect...
The Scanning Song:
Scanning photos is no fun
Scan from dawn till the set of sun
Scan from day, scan till night
Yet I still can't get it right
More stanzas to follow once I get more inspiration from more scanning!
Posted by scrabbyfoo at June 28, 2005 01:16 PM