Hello, Heros
If for some reason you were expecting this website to be YouTube, and for you to be a YouTube subscriber, you must surely be mistaken- and lost in the wrong internet department. ah blasts. you must've missed the Patreon isle or mint mobile advertising department, just take a left two doors down... ah - just forget about it.
SIDE QUEST
So I love photography, I've been a huge fan of it since my late grandfather got me into it all the way back in high school. I think it allows us humans to capture the world around us in ways words cannot.
But before my grandfather passed away in 2021, he luckily showed me a few items that inspired me even further to pursue photography. one of those items was a Super 8 camera from the 1960s (or even earlier, it's a German Bauer C1M super, and trust me I've looked all over the internet for a manual - this thing is a non-existent relic and that's all I know about it.)
The last item was a collection of developed vintage 35mm color slides. However, the only problem was that these slides haven't seen the light of day in over 40+ years.
Which makes me wonder what would've happened if these slides were accidentally tossed out? I'm glad I found them when I did.
Phew,
Feel free to check out some of my videos of this process of developing the slides in the coming days on my YouTube channel and instagram: @joeshoeeeephoto.
But just a few months ago, I was able to (finally) finish my project of digitizing all of the slides.
To my complete surprise, however, was the fact that a good portion of photographs were from my Grandfather's brother (my great uncle) who is still alive. (he is the last brother alive out of the three brothers)
The photographs? They were incredible photos of locations in Japan that he had visited during his military service.
And so began my idea of a side quest-
What if I were to put on a slideshow and show my great uncle photographs that he took of the time he spent in the Korean War, which he probably hasn't seen in over 40 years?
I managed to digitize every photograph, organize a slide show, and gathered most of my cousins and family do exactly that.
It was seriously. flipping. awesome.
EXP share
Looking at some of the photographs he took of Japan in the past. They carry waves of nostalgia, even if I didn't live these memories myself. I'm a huge fan of this cinematic aesthetic, and this is what partially inspired me to pursue this look for some of my own photographs and YouTube videos.
Feel free to check out some of the photographs my great uncle took (very little color correcting and editing was done):
Please, I encourage you to ask your parents, grandparents or any relatives if they have recorded slides or documents - get to work in digitizing these and stored on the cloud ASAP. All it takes is one pipe burst, water spill, or environmental cataclysm to permanently damage precious film.
Once stored electronically, data is saved, stored, and easily accessible for everyone in your family to see. I personally use iCloud+ to securely store data, and I've been doing so for plenty of years and have had no issues with storage or privacy. Apple does an incredible job IMO compared to google/microsoft.
Portable SSDs are also excellent options for housing heaps of data over periods of time, with fast read/write speeds, and are actually getting relatively cheaper each year.
$179 Digitizer for digitizing old colored slides: https://amzn.to/3EuHnRD
iCloud + : $10.99 per month
Samsung SSD 1 TB (good enough for housing heaps of family photographs): https://amzn.to/4i1SAYz
Embrace Entropyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
Quote:
"Who spilled these stars across the sky, like sparkling dust, like clouds of light, they pour their milky shine into the deep black bowl" -The Milky Way, de Barbara Juster Esbensen
Thanks for reading DO MORE SIDE QUESTS! I’ll see you in the next one.
If you have any ideas or suggestions for the newsletter, I’m all ears! Seriously, I want your feedback. Send your thoughts to [email protected]—let me know what you want to see and how I can make this better.
Cheers,
Joseph Shoemaker | Jet Blizzard
