Although there are chapters left out of The Focused Fight, I've been working on my sophomore book. The working title so far is "Something to do About Cars." Or fun car stories from the road. I plan to publish it later this year.
I've been working on a story involving a 1984 Epic Olympic Trip to Los Angelos, California, that I took following college graduation with three other friends. It has conjured up all kinds of pleasant memories of a 6,000-mile road trip from Cleveland, Ohio, to LA and back.
While working on the story, I ran into trouble locating my photo album or all those photos from three + weeks of Games and travel.
Here is the excerpt of the story:
While "researching" the recesses of my long-term memory from the summer of 1984, coupled with calling Olympic Trip car-mate Mary, I've learned photographs can undoubtedly help in this type of endeavor for more details on this particular story. Oh, I took many photos of the Games and our travels from that epic trip with my brand new Canon AE-1 Program, but I can only "find" a few of them today. I cannot find the bulk of them unless I go down another rabbit hole to peruse thousands of photos stashed in several boxes around the house. One would think I would have a decked-out photo album like my friend Mary has; alas, I do not.
What I do have are negatives! They are neatly organized by year(s) in shoeboxes that I've been able to get my hands on. I almost threw them away a few years ago, but something told me to hold on to them. I'm glad I listened to my gut.
Anyone born after 2000 or so probably has never seen a negative unless they've snooped around in their parents or grandparents stashed boxes of photos that may or may not include negatives in the envelopes. Digital photography captured a vast market that gave film photography a run for its money at the millennium. We bought our first digital camera, a Sony, in 2000, yielding outstanding results—leaving negatives in the rearview mirror.
Since I did not want to go down the rabbit hole of the 1984 Games photo-finding journey, I turned my attention to the negatives I had on hand. Hmmm. I thought the easiest thing to do would be to send the negatives out to a photo processor to make prints, and perhaps, digital photos. I checked out this scenario about five years ago but didn't bite the bullet.
Let me offer that things have mightily changed in the last five years. Phone apps will take care of this problem…with no problems. I downloaded a couple of them on my iPhone to check out the ease and fluidly. I carefully read the reviews and did some test strips to see how well the apps worked. I think this method/app would work well with slides too. I decided to use my phone instead of the computer or tablet to easily upload the saved photos to the cloud through my Apple and Google photo accounts. The app I decided to use and pay for is FilmBox by Photomyne. Link here:
The app worked for my purposes for now. Please check out a couple of photos below.
Doing all the leg work for this rabbit hole maybe saved me some time on the rabbit hole of looking through a bunch of boxes with thousands of photos. If the story sticks, I may eventually have to uncover those photo treasures or call Mary to send me more photos from her photo album!
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