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June 4-6, 1970: A Visit With My Sister Judy |
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Return to the Index for 1970 |
This page begins a photo album housing all the pictures that I, myself, began taking in the summer of 1970. I had no idea at the time that I would end up taking so many pictures throughout my adult life, nor did I have any idea that the explanations that I would write for those I sent home from Korea would become the impetus for a continuation of that practice in the subsequent years.
And of course I had absolutely no idea that one day I would be able to put all the pictures into a form that would enable me to share them with family, friends, and indeed the entire world. All that was decades in the future.
For now, I begin at the beginning with the very first introductory comments I wrote when I first typed up all the notes I'd written in the first couple of years and put into physical photo albums of the prints of pictures I had taken up to that time.
| "My photographic career can be dated from June 1, 1970, about ten days before I left for Korea. Using first the old Argus borrowed from my Dad, I graduated to a new Nikon purchased in Japan. It's really too bad that I did not begin taking pictures earlier; I'm sure the record would have been interesting to me much later, as I hope this record will be. This narrative is something more than an explanation of just the pictures, yet a good deal less than a diary. I must assume that the verbiage won't detract from the main purpose: to record for myself the unique experiences offered during my tour in the Far East, and then to continue that record to the more mundane happenings that occurred after that time."
Chicago |
That first note was, for many years, the introductory note for my typed narrative pages. It was not until much later, when I contemplated having all my slides converted into prints so that I could create actual photo albums (rather than show the slides with a projector). At that time, I added another comment to the introduction, and this became the first physical page in the first physical volume of my large set of photo albums.
| "I am finally getting to the point where I have the time to catalog these slides and the many, many pictures I took after I began transcribing my slide narratives in 1975. I have had the slides transferred to prints, and I have purchased enough albums to hold them. I have continued my narratives beyond 1975, and the narratives (and pictures) now cover the years from 1975 through the present. Looking back, I can see from here that my life since the original narratives were written has taken turns that I could not possibly have imagined. It is to chronicle these happenings that I have continued taking pictures and writing narratives as I go.
Dallas |
From that point onward, I continued taking pictures (using print, rather than slide film) and putting the best of them in the expanding bookshelf of photo albums. I developed a format for the albums, allowing someone to see a set of three pictures at a time on one side of the album, and the narrative for each picture on the opposite side.
But, beginning just after the turn of the millennium, I had an idea of how to make my photo history more than just a photo album, and at that time I wrote the third and final introductory comment.
| "Fred and I have purchased our first digital cameras, although they have been available for quite some time. In conjunction with the personal computers we have, this has obviated the need for physical photo albums. I have purchased an Internet domain and can now upload my pictures for everyone to see. I can even add the movies my camera takes, something I could not do with the physical albums. I am also able to easily add narrative, maps, aerial views, graphics, and explanatory material from the Internet to make my online photo album a true multimedia experience. And anyone with Internet access can look at everything. So, from this point forward, I plan to create online photo album pages, linking them together and also linking them to other Internet resources. Freed from the expense of buying film and developing and printing it, I am able to take many more pictures than previously, creating a record of not just the memorable but also the mundane, and so the album "pages" have gotten infinitely more complex. I have also decided to begin a process of working backward through my print albums, digitizing those prints and then using the narrative already written (supplementing with Internet resources), to create album pages for all the pictures taken up to this point. This will be an extremely large task, and I expect it will take many years to complete. But when it is finished, "my life in pictures" will be available for anyone to see. It will also be a backup for my own memories. They will fade, but, so long as my ISP is paid, they will be available to anyone- perhaps even after I am gone.
Dallas-Fort Lauderdale |
Indeed I DID begin that process, and I can report now that with the pages for Album Year 1970, which were finally finished in 2022, that project is complete.
Now I can simply keep adding pages as I make trips, see things, and record them. I hope to do this for quite some years yet, but we shall see.
Dallas-Fort Lauderdale-Cumbaya
August, 2022
You can use the link below to begin with the first page of the photo album.
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June 4-6, 1970: A Visit With My Sister Judy |
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Return to the Index for 1970 |