The Joys of Photographic Waybacking

Remember Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine. Mr Peabody was dog, with a pet boy Sherman, that used his Wayback time travel machine to visit the past. I’m not sure if he ever visited the future; that’s a question best left to Rocky and Bullwinkle historians. Well, I have Wayback machines; they’re called film and flatbed scanners. I spend way to much time scanning and restoring old photographs. Over the years I’ve scanned thousands of images. It only takes a few minutes to get a high quality scan but it can take days of image editing to restore old damaged originals. Hence, I always have a backlog of scanned pictures to fix.

My enthusiasm for this endless task waxes and wanes with my general photographic energies. A few weeks ago I upgraded my arsenal of DLSR cameras and lenses. New lenses always give me boast. So lately I’ve been out pixel harvesting with a lovely little f2.8 macro lens.  I think she I will be an item for years to come — wide open her bokeh is beautiful. While I enjoy working with my spanking new crystal clear digital images I often find myself wandering in my vast image file directories and picking out old scans to work on. Today I whiled away a rainy afternoon restoring pictures I took over forty years ago. Here’s a shot from my ACS Beirut Lebanon boarding school days. This is from an old Instamatic camera. I believe it was my second camera. Over the years my cameras have gotten better and better but they still cannot go Wayback in time.