We installed WordPress on 2012-10-04 so that Sarah would have a blog for her Gap Year. As I would be administering the site (it’s on our own server at home), I thought I’d better get familiar with the system by having my own blog too. As you can see, stuff on my hard disc has provided almost instant content and the blog already dates back 38 years with one outlier from a very memorable walk 49 years ago ! This explains why this “welcome” post is somewhat in the middle, and not remoely at the “beginning” of the blog. Currently there’s a distinct gap in the posts in the 1995-2002 period. There’s two reasons for this (1) Sarah was born in 1994, which limited us a bit, then Michael was born in 1997, and having two under-school age children did limit our activities quite a lot. (2) Again, having young children, we found that relatives liked to see photos, so we moved away from slides to negative film so we could pass prints around and generate copies for the family. Negatives, however, were harder to index and scan, and very few of the photos we took in those years have made it into digital form – yet.

I’ve just (November 2012) filed almost all of our 35mm negatives (including black and white ones dating back to the mid-seventies), which adds up to 140 folder pages, so around 4000 photos. I can put dates on about three quarters of these and make some guesses about the rest. The aim is to produce a numbering system for the films that will enable me to start cataloguing the negatives and have some rational means to generate file names for any that I scan. For slide films, my 11000 photos are pretty thoroughly catalogued and from the advent of digital photography, which in our case means around the end of 2002, the photos are pretty much all captioned as well as having all the usual metadata. So I hope the older articles will soon be well illustrated too !