The photo purge has officially begun…
:The science or lack thereof of editing down a slide collection.
Magic was stronger back then. I took a $5 bill from my pocket, bought a metal roll of film, had fun with it in my camera, then a few hours after leaving it, a photo lab presented me with 36 or so cardboard mounted original images. WOW! ...and they last so well after all these decades.
Oh yes, they each can be scanned into a digital image with limitless possibilities to convert them into a master print. Not owning a scanner it's $25 per scan and 15 minutes of someone's time to dress it up minus the dust that may have accumulated through the many years. No worries, my thousands are all safely in protective sheets free of chemicals...no dust..
Well...until the house fire in DEC '16. Then, thousands of slides safely in Kodak slide trays were unceremoniously dumped into protective containers. I used all in various slides shows for photo clubs and other associations. Now they have sat for over a year in protective containers.
What to do? Well, I take my own advice I share with others...let go, edit, select, donate, toss, eliminate...so you end up with gems that deserve to be saved. Easy advice. I actually am hired by intermediate and advanced photographers for this same advice...and more.
My files as a professional photojournalist contain between 224,000 and 225,000 negatives, transparencies and slides. I have been putting this off for years. From these images, I have been published thousands of times. OK. That was then, this is now.
Less is more...and I so believe that. Yesterday, I took scissors to 25 transparencies. Today, a mixture of slides and transparencies...totaling 25. So my mission...and I agree to accept it, is to eliminate 25 slides/transparencies/negs each and every day. Yikes!
In the meantime, I invite you who is reading this now, to bring in some of your images into The Gallery at no charge for me to share a friendly critique. NO...no advice to eliminate simply a diversion for me away from my images. Deal? Your move...email me at floyd@floydgallery.com. You'll be glad you did.
About the Author: Robert Floyd is a naturalist, photojournalist, and photo gallery owner. You can usually find him, when he’s not in The Floyd Photo Gallery, leading field trips from late morning to early evening in the beautiful Pioneer Valley, Cape Cod, Cape May, Newport, Manhattan, and Canada. Follow him here and on Facebook.
