I don't know about you but I'm getting pretty overwhelmed with all that i can do with computers, their applications, and digital peripherals.
I came to have this epiphany about my digital lifestyle, which is a shadow of other peoples' total immersion in all things digital. Let me describe it.
I am in the middle of a self-imposed project digitizing thousands of 35mm negatives and slides, photos taken by me since the 1960s, with substantial physical contributions from my wife as she became our family photographer from the early 80s.
When I began this project I investigated professional services and discovered that the best deal i could get was a thousand plus for twenty-five cents per image. That's $250 per thousand. I also checked the prices of scanners that would provide reasonably good images and bought one for about $300. I could see the cost advantage of buying the scanner and doing the job myself. I just checked my scanned negatives folder and found that I've scanned 2771 negatives. In terms of cost, the scanner has more than paid for itself.
However, there are other disadvantages, namely the time involved. It takes an amount of patience to set aside an hour or two every day to load and scan the negatives. I don't take the time to do any editing such as cropping, red-eye removal, color fixes. I've been at this for months and I'm less than half way through!
It was during one of these recent scanning sessions that I came to have this revelation about the digital age.
Let's take just the scanner for a moment. Beyond my use as a film scanner, I've read about "document management" that can be done with it. Fine, I thought, let's try that. So I scanned a few paper documents laying around on my computer table (I hesitate to refer to it as a "desktop" anymore). I tried out a couple of document management programs that essentially file digital copies of your paper documents into digital folders. I could really get into this by scanning all our important documents that we've filed away in a four-drawer file cabinet. I'll get to it right after I finish scanning the negatives and slides!
Document management seems like a reasonable and practical application of a scanner. But wait, there's more! One of my hobbies is to run an online magazine, which comprises digitized copies of an old magazine that a friend and I published in the 80s. I use the scanner to scan the art and text, running the text through an optical character recognition (OCR) program.
And the scanner is good for scanning the occasional newspaper article or garden/barbecue photos in Sunset magazine - all saved digitally for future reference.
And all that's just for the scanner! There's the digital music arena that has grown so huge in recent years. Actually the digital age for music began in the late 70s with the release of Compact Discs (CDs) containing music from our favorite bands, orchestras, singers, and even (irony of ironies!) digitized sounds of steam locomotives! Talk about an anachronism. CDs work fine for most of us, though there's a small but growing crowd who prefer the analog recordings of yesteryear (vinyl records). However, most of us have a CD player and our own collection of CDs.
In addition to the process of digitizing old negatives I've been using a digital camera since about 1998, taking shots of family, friends, association activities, projects at work, and so on. My Pictures folder of digital photos (this does not include scanned images) contains over 17,000 photos taken with my digital cameras in nine years. That's a lot of stale gum!
About three years ago i began ripping all my 300 CDs onto my computer for two reasons: One, so i could listen to anything without having to search for it in my physical collection, and Two, to create a backup of my music collection. Again this was somewhat time-consuming, even given that iTunes could rip at several times the play speed. Of course, using iTunes provided added bonuses for my collection of digital music, among them the ability to create playlists. I have a separate playlist of all our Christmas albums and pipe it through our home stereo system using the "shuffle" option. Imagine ten days of Christmas music that never seems to repeat.
Speaking of music, several times in the last ten years I've attempted to digitize a bunch of old vinyl albums and cassette tapes. This project has gone in fits and starts simply because of the time investment required. You cannot speed up the process of recording tapes and records into your computer, so this is all real-time. Part of this process is to run your recently acquired record albums through one of those neat applications that help remove the noise that was transferred over with with music: pops, and buzzes picked up from scratches on the record, AC hum due to poor grounding of the turntable, general hiss, and so forth. Again this can be labor-intensive as you sit there and listen after this process has completed, since you can manually delete noisome sounds after the automatic process has done its job. Finally you sit there and listen to the finished work and give it your stamp of approval by copying it to a CD. Figure on over three hours per record album.
In the ensuing years I've slowly culled albums that have been re-released as CDs so I now have only six or seven that I want to digitize. However, that doesn't include about fifty or sixty audio cassettes that my wife recorded during her years teaching ESL abroad, which she would love to save.
So far digital movies have escaped my notice simply because I'm not interested in doing more than snapshots with my still camera (digital, of course!). However, I do have a good friend who truly enjoys the benefits of digital movie-making. As a teenage in Berkeley he and several friends made a few gangster and monster movies using 8mm film. He has transferred his original film into digital format, added music and narrative soundtracks, cleaned up the dust and dirt frame by frame, and has created a digital versatile disc (DVD) composed of his movies, complete with an introductory menu sequence, also with sound.
I've just scratched the surface as there is so much more to our digital world and peoples' digital lifestyles. So what about my opening question: Is the digital age all it's cracked up to be: In a word - Yes. I may never finish my digitizing projects but I'm enjoying scanning old photos because they bring back good memories. I enjoy my digitized music collection for the fact that I can select just about anything I have and play it back in very short order.
Beyond personal digitizing, there's the joy of exploring the world and beyond via the Internet; there's the fun (and occasional embarrassment) of staying in touch by email; I am so happy that I don't have to use a typewriter to put down my thoughts and my handwriting was always pretty atrocious.
I came to have this epiphany about my digital lifestyle, which is a shadow of other peoples' total immersion in all things digital. Let me describe it.
I am in the middle of a self-imposed project digitizing thousands of 35mm negatives and slides, photos taken by me since the 1960s, with substantial physical contributions from my wife as she became our family photographer from the early 80s.
When I began this project I investigated professional services and discovered that the best deal i could get was a thousand plus for twenty-five cents per image. That's $250 per thousand. I also checked the prices of scanners that would provide reasonably good images and bought one for about $300. I could see the cost advantage of buying the scanner and doing the job myself. I just checked my scanned negatives folder and found that I've scanned 2771 negatives. In terms of cost, the scanner has more than paid for itself.
However, there are other disadvantages, namely the time involved. It takes an amount of patience to set aside an hour or two every day to load and scan the negatives. I don't take the time to do any editing such as cropping, red-eye removal, color fixes. I've been at this for months and I'm less than half way through!
It was during one of these recent scanning sessions that I came to have this revelation about the digital age.
Let's take just the scanner for a moment. Beyond my use as a film scanner, I've read about "document management" that can be done with it. Fine, I thought, let's try that. So I scanned a few paper documents laying around on my computer table (I hesitate to refer to it as a "desktop" anymore). I tried out a couple of document management programs that essentially file digital copies of your paper documents into digital folders. I could really get into this by scanning all our important documents that we've filed away in a four-drawer file cabinet. I'll get to it right after I finish scanning the negatives and slides!
Document management seems like a reasonable and practical application of a scanner. But wait, there's more! One of my hobbies is to run an online magazine, which comprises digitized copies of an old magazine that a friend and I published in the 80s. I use the scanner to scan the art and text, running the text through an optical character recognition (OCR) program.
And the scanner is good for scanning the occasional newspaper article or garden/barbecue photos in Sunset magazine - all saved digitally for future reference.
And all that's just for the scanner! There's the digital music arena that has grown so huge in recent years. Actually the digital age for music began in the late 70s with the release of Compact Discs (CDs) containing music from our favorite bands, orchestras, singers, and even (irony of ironies!) digitized sounds of steam locomotives! Talk about an anachronism. CDs work fine for most of us, though there's a small but growing crowd who prefer the analog recordings of yesteryear (vinyl records). However, most of us have a CD player and our own collection of CDs.
In addition to the process of digitizing old negatives I've been using a digital camera since about 1998, taking shots of family, friends, association activities, projects at work, and so on. My Pictures folder of digital photos (this does not include scanned images) contains over 17,000 photos taken with my digital cameras in nine years. That's a lot of stale gum!
About three years ago i began ripping all my 300 CDs onto my computer for two reasons: One, so i could listen to anything without having to search for it in my physical collection, and Two, to create a backup of my music collection. Again this was somewhat time-consuming, even given that iTunes could rip at several times the play speed. Of course, using iTunes provided added bonuses for my collection of digital music, among them the ability to create playlists. I have a separate playlist of all our Christmas albums and pipe it through our home stereo system using the "shuffle" option. Imagine ten days of Christmas music that never seems to repeat.
Speaking of music, several times in the last ten years I've attempted to digitize a bunch of old vinyl albums and cassette tapes. This project has gone in fits and starts simply because of the time investment required. You cannot speed up the process of recording tapes and records into your computer, so this is all real-time. Part of this process is to run your recently acquired record albums through one of those neat applications that help remove the noise that was transferred over with with music: pops, and buzzes picked up from scratches on the record, AC hum due to poor grounding of the turntable, general hiss, and so forth. Again this can be labor-intensive as you sit there and listen after this process has completed, since you can manually delete noisome sounds after the automatic process has done its job. Finally you sit there and listen to the finished work and give it your stamp of approval by copying it to a CD. Figure on over three hours per record album.
In the ensuing years I've slowly culled albums that have been re-released as CDs so I now have only six or seven that I want to digitize. However, that doesn't include about fifty or sixty audio cassettes that my wife recorded during her years teaching ESL abroad, which she would love to save.
So far digital movies have escaped my notice simply because I'm not interested in doing more than snapshots with my still camera (digital, of course!). However, I do have a good friend who truly enjoys the benefits of digital movie-making. As a teenage in Berkeley he and several friends made a few gangster and monster movies using 8mm film. He has transferred his original film into digital format, added music and narrative soundtracks, cleaned up the dust and dirt frame by frame, and has created a digital versatile disc (DVD) composed of his movies, complete with an introductory menu sequence, also with sound.
I've just scratched the surface as there is so much more to our digital world and peoples' digital lifestyles. So what about my opening question: Is the digital age all it's cracked up to be: In a word - Yes. I may never finish my digitizing projects but I'm enjoying scanning old photos because they bring back good memories. I enjoy my digitized music collection for the fact that I can select just about anything I have and play it back in very short order.
Beyond personal digitizing, there's the joy of exploring the world and beyond via the Internet; there's the fun (and occasional embarrassment) of staying in touch by email; I am so happy that I don't have to use a typewriter to put down my thoughts and my handwriting was always pretty atrocious.