Today’s Post by Joe Farace
You’re safer in the race car than you are in cars going to and from the track. —Mario Andretti
Like Jim Hayes, whose post Preserving Memories at Watkins Glen is worth a read, I have a lot of old images of cars and vintage motorsports action that were shot on 35mm slide film. There are some I also shot on negative film too and scanning prints isn’t all that hard and many of us have some kind of desktop scanner, even it’s just an all-in-one sitting on a desk. The problem is that the scanning process, especially prints, while it can be relatively simple, becomes mind-numbing when you have to scan lots of pictures. And if you have slides it becomes even more painful.
Scanning Your Memories
So why not let somebody else do it? “Too expensive,” you say? For the person that has shoe boxes full of prints and slides I found the answer: ScanMyPhotos.com’s Prepaid Photo Scanning Box for $156.75 they will scan up to 540 35mm slides into 2000dpi Premium quality (400 dpi) JPEG files and for a few extra bucks ($59.95.) You should check their website for details, options and prices. It took only a week from when I handed over my box at the post office until everything was returned. I was simply amazed by the quality of their scans but even more so for the slides because many of them were not in very good condition.
My experience with ScanMyPhotos.com digitizing some of these old 1964 US Grand Prix slides that were shot using Perutz Color slide film, like the shot of Jack Brabham above, was impressive given the slide’s extremely faded and deteriorated condition. On the other hand some of my Kodak Ektachrome slides produced scans of images that looked like they were made yesterday.
ScanMyPhotos offers a wonderfully seamless process for digitizing images that have been dormant for many years and bringing them back to life. If you’ve got some old car slides, it’s time to bring them into the digital age.
PS: This is not a sponsored post. The above is merely my experience with working with ScanMyPhotos.com for several projects including dozens of old prints that were scanned for a gift for Mary’s mother on the occasion of her 90th birthday!
Podcast number 9 pf the Pixels. Grain & Cookies podcast is now on-line on my YouTube channel. In this episode, I describe a photography assignment when I photographed five classic Chevrolet automobiles—all together—at an outdoor museum and it had a few unexpected twists and turns that, when viewed in retrospect, were more of a challenge than I was prepared for,