As a little side project I have been working on scanning slides from my Dad’s time in the US Navy in the 60s and 70s. He has tons of boxes of slides with images from all over the world. He would take the pictures, send them home, and his Mom and Grandma would get them turned into projection slides.

I can remember as a little kid setting up the screen and the projector at my Grandma’s house and sitting there for hours as we looked at every box of slides. My Dad and Grandma would try to place each photo’s location and context while trying to use the scant notes that were in each slide box. A lot of “Man! Why didn’t I keep that car?” could also be heard.

The point of this post is mostly photos, but it’s also to say how amazingly far photography has come in the last decades. Camera companies have spent their every waking hour making cameras that can capture truer color and sharper images with a ton of megapixels, and now, photographers are running actions and buying cameras to get their photos to have the same feel as these original photos. You could run a million actions or spend hours tweaking a photo, but I don’t think digital photos today can ever have the same feel as an original photo from the 60s. You can really feel the history of the photo when you look at it.

I have scanned two boxes of slides and have about ten more to go. Here are some of my favorites so far…enjoy! Click any photo to see a larger version of it.