About ten years ago the business bought a scanner. It was bloody marvelous to be able to scan documents for filing and emailing....and of course I bought a CanoScan 8000F that just happened to be able to scan slides and negatives as well. At that time I embarked on a project to digitise the hundreds, or more like thousands of photos I had taken myself as well as those inherited from my parents and grandparents. I made a good start capturing many old family prints and made a huge dent in scanning all my slides from the mid to late 70's and colour negatives from the 80's & 90's before running out of steam....for a few years....quite a few years!! That was pretty dumb because when I finally got around to resuming the project, I struck problems in that I'd lost my disc for Photoshop Elements and the only copy I had was on a redundant old pc and the CanoScan doesn't function fully on the new 64bit PC's so I couldn't use it for negatives. Bugger....so I grabbed some obsolete PC's that hadn't been disposed of, took them and the scanner (which had now been written off the books) home for a play. Having established that one of the PC's was up to the task, I recomenced scanning, starting with my Black&White negatives from 1972-74. These included a mixed bag of pix taken on an extremely cheap, plastic lensed instamatic and my first SLR, a Zenith B, which had no light-meter and fastest shutter speed of 500th of a second.
There were a few family pix, but most of the 1972 neg's were old gliding pix taken on my gliding exploits out of Hood aerodrome in Masterton. Many were damaged and hadn't passed the test of time very well but there were a few beauties that need a bit of retouching. These pix invoked memories of soaring over the Wairarapa Valley. Reminders of how small the country is because at 6,000 ft over the 5,000 ft Tararuas, one can see the coast on both sides of the North Island. How the Tararuas generate some of the best Wave flying in the world as the Gliding height record was gained out of here by Doug Yarrall in 1968 at just over 37,000 ft. Of days when ply and fabric covered metal framed old shitters shared the skies with high performance glass ships and how I'd achieved 'C' status, 'Silver C' height gain of 1,000 mtr & duration of 5 hours soaring and 'Gold' Height gain of 3,000 mtrs (but I had to go to 17,000ft to get it because the prat towing me took to 8,000ft over the 'rotor'!!). I was lucky enough to soar in the days when they sometimes still used Tiger Moths as tow planes. ….Fun Days!
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These blogs were posted on the KiwiBiker forum but I decided it was time for a change. Archives
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