One of my first attempts at a website was KBOA830.com. That was about 13 years ago and I’ve moved it around several times since then. The impetus for the site was a bunch of photos from the late ’40s, given to me by one of the original employees of the station.
When flickr came along, I uploaded the photos there but the scans were low rez because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve thought about rescanning but that’s one tedious chore.
A couple of months ago I boxed up 120 of the prints and sent them off to ScanCafe where they were “scanned by hand” for about 29 cents each. It took a while (I think the scanning is done in India) but the prints were safely returned along with a DVD of 300dpi images.
Turns out I can’t delete the lorez images yet because I’ve linked to them from the KBOA site. Once I get that all sorted out I can get rid of the duplicates.
If you have a box of prints (or 35m slides or negatives), send them to ScanCafe (or one fo the similar services) and get them digitized. And then put them online, because that is the only hope you have of giving them a life beyond your own.
Footnote: I never tire of looking at these images. The tower and the transmitters and the studios… all of the expensive stuff it took to communicate in 1947. If you had something to say to your community (forget the world) you had to build/buy/go to work for one of these entities (radio station, TV, newspaper). All changed now. And changing. I love it.
The photos were taken by John Reeder, one of the original KBOA employees. A few years before he died, he sent me a box stuffed with big B/W negatives he shot in late 40’s and early 50s. I hand them printed and put them up on flickr.
I know he’d be pleased they are “up in the cloud” where anyone can find, enjoy and share. My goal is to get all of my photos “up there.”
Mays…these pictures are absolutely great! It is amazing how you have managed to save them and, also, that someone was around to actually take these works of photo art. I was on the north side of the square that day to see Smiley Burnett. And Narvel Felts still owes my dad for two of his babies he delivered. JB