Almost 12 years ago, I took a little trip to France. It was my graduation gift to myself, after completing my degree in French (crazy, huh?). I spent a little over five weeks there, about two weeks in Paris, about a week and a half on the riviera between Marseille and Nice, a week in Brittany, and a few days in transit by train.
Yesterday, Eli and I bought a new print/scanner/multipurpose device. We found that while it is super-snazzy, it doesn’t have the ability to scan negatives. This brought my mind back to that old trip and all the photos I took, almost all on film. My digital photos from that trip are long lost in the craziness of transferring from computer to cimputer to computer over the past 12 years. Somewhere many years ago, they got erased. Its too bad, but they were mostly just photos I took in museums and not those from the landscapes around me. If I really need to know about the art I saw, I can get at most of it online nowadays. I’ll just keep telling myself that…
But those photos I took on film filled quite a few rolls and two nice photo albums. Before I get the printer set up tomorrow, I wanted to see how well the old printer/scanner/thing worked for scanning negatives. Now that we’ve had it for over four years and haven’t used that function once. Silly me.
Turns out that it works fairly decently. Not well enough to make prints from. But that’s just fine, because I still have the negatives if I ever need prints. But for blogging or what-have-you, it’s kind of nice to be able to get some of my old photographs together in the same place with the new. I am pretty proud of some of these old photos. They have a glimmer of vision, and I can see that my artistic voice was just getting started back then. It’s a nice blast from the past.
The shots in this post are all from the Marseille leg of my trip. The first shot, above, is of the Mediterranean as seen through one of the windows of the Chateau d’If, an island prison off the coast that was one of the settings of The Count of Monte Cristo. This shot is one of my favorites when I think of my early photography.
I may post more throughout the summer as I wade through these old negatives. I’ll have to keep the old printer just long enough to get them scanned in.
If I really need to know about the art I saw, I can get at most of it online nowadays.
Or you could go back to France, take a friend or someone like that… o:-)
Loved taking a visual journey with you. Beautiful.
Wow! I can’t believe you unearthed these treasures. I was sure that they were lost forever back in Lucy or something. But, those must have been the photos from the art museums. Anyway, they are beautiful, and I’m so glad you chose to share them with the world. Thanks!