And more about cameras...

My mom recently moved and gave me a rather large pile of pictures (I also got a large pile from my mother-in-law, and one from the choir reunion I just went to...I have quite the large selection of pictures that need to be scanned, documented, and put into albums...yikes)

I was glancing through them this weekend (getting all those extra pictures into one place) and I found this one.

This is a picture of my bedroom when I was in high school (late 70s). See the groovy purple stripe? I still can't believe my mom let me do this to my room. Pretty cool lady, eh?

About 1/3 of the pictures I have are of this ilk... done on the instant camera where it pushed out the picture and you watched it develop before your eyes. They were never very good pictures to start with; I don't think time will be kind to them. And remember old polaroids where you pulled out the photo, waited one minute, and then peeled off the paper (and wiped some chemical over the picture)? I don't think I have any of these. I think they are pretty poor archival quality, also, but don't know for sure.

About 1/3 of the pictures I just took posession of were taken on the 110 type film. Remember the slim camera? With the blue flash arrays you stuck on top of them to get flash? Really bad, grainy photos. And my whole high school career is on these.

The remaining 1/3 are split between early color pictures from the sixties (these have probably fared the worst in terms of losing quality... they are in the square format...I don't recall that film type, but I remember having a Kodak "Brownie" camera that you held at your chest/belly and looked down into the view finder from the top) and black and white pictures from before then. The black and white pictures are as clear as the day they were first developed. Funny, huh. The oldest pictures are the ones I'm the least worried about preserving...I need to start on the newer ones, first!