COBBLER'S PAGE

By Brian Asquith (Librarian)

Thousands of slides, pictures covering everything you could think of, lie in little plastic boxes, carousel magazines, trays. and even in large cardboardboxes. Very few are looked at until I want a particular one, then the search for it can take hours. Some are in a kind of system ie. places or events, but the majority await sorting out. 

Several times I have set out to get the lot organised but have failed, almost lost the will to live after being surrounded with pictures with no appropriate category available. The organised ones among you will be feeling pleasantly superior now as you will have a system and can put your finger on any picture you want by referring to your index. I have listened to a professional who organised 12,000 slides of trains. It took him two years to get them on to a computer. Now he can trace a single shot within five minutes. Of course the driving force behind this exercise is that he has to find certain pictures for his clients all the time and for him time is money. I have no such incentive, though if added up I have probably spent a year searching the boxes over the time the collection has grown. So, what is the use of this mountain of pictures, prints as well as slides, that are so rarely looked at? Well there are a lot of memories, which is one of the masons they don’t get sorted. I start with good intentions but I get sidetracked, I cannot throw that one away even though it has faded and has got a wee bit of fungus showing nicely,well what can you expect from a forty year old slide on Ferrania? You just don’t throw memories away! Among all these are the slide shows put together and taken round clubs and AV presentations spanning fourteen years, sequences shown to hundreds of audiences over that time.

Slide shows have a reputation for being boring and sometimes I can see why they have that reputation. Recently I attended two shows of one hour each. The first was an example of how not to do a slide show. No title slide, commentary pointing out the obvious, three slides used to make the same point, no continuity he kept going back over the same ground, and making remarks like I don’t know what this is but it’s nice isn’t it?

Some pictures were not sharp, some were too dark, but in any case there were fur too many at two hundred. The shame is that there really was a good slide show in there All it needed was abit of work to weed out the repetition, take out the poor quality stuff and use an informative, spare commentary. and cut the number of slides down, a hundred and fifty would have been ample in this case. The audience went away bored, those that managed to stay awake, and slide shows got another bad press. 

The second show was a better example of how it should done although even that would have been better without several under-exposed pictures. Their inclusion was not really essential to an audience but he had them as memory triggers, even if it was remind him only of the time his metering let him down. 

So, what to do with my own huge collection? I can’t turn them all into shows or AV’s. Is it time to be nithless, throw a lot away and organise the remainder? I don’t think I can spare that much time, best to leave them as they axe I shall still enjoy coming across unexpected pictures and the memories they stir.

Brain sent in two slides of contrasting landscapes. One is in Naminia and the other in Iceland. There are no prizes for stating which is which! They are both on home processed Konicachrome.