In that last century, a friend I miss as he died, Mark Budgen, in his own inimitable way predicted this one. I called him and when he answered he said, “I cannot talk to you know as I am monitoring a fax.”
He was accurate in knowing that now, more than ever, folks don’t want to talk on the phone and would rather be texted. Budgen did not know that his state-of-the-art fax machine would be obsolete in this 21st century.
There is another device (far more advanced than the fax machine) that now is overlooked by many but not by me. This is the good flatbed scanner. Mine is an Epson PerfectionV700 Photo. I use it to scan my negatives, slides, transparencies (large slides) and photographs. I use it to scan the plants from my gardens. These plant scanographs, as I call them, I have done since 2001. I now have over 3000 of them. I also use my scanner as a tabletop camera as the image illustrating this blog shows.
I believe that most people have a family album that is put away and rarely seen. Because I have a very good filing system, most of the photographs (and family photographs) that I have ever taken either with film or with digital devices like my Fuji X-E3, iPhone3G and Galaxy 5 phone, are safely stored in duplicate exterior hard drives.
But I can happily report that my scanner is now manifesting an interesting purpose I never thought of. In the last few weeks I have been perusing over the stored family albums. I have one for Rosemary and me, one for my oldest daughter Alexandra, one for the younger one Hilary and one for my own family from Spain, the Philippines and Argentina.
Today I spotted this 1& ¼ by 1& ¾ inch tiny picture of a very young Rosemary. I had never noticed it. I scanned it and then made a print on inkjet transparency material mated with a silver cardboard (why not?). It is astounding the level of detail that my scanner has been able to achieve when I enlarged it to almost 8x10.
There is another (almost pleasant) feeling of seeing the enlarged portrait of Rosemary. It is almost like seeing her for the first time, before I ever met her. She was alive and had a whole future in front of her. Little did she know that it was a future that would have me as her companion for 52 years.
This is blog 5978.
