Easin’ Along has taken a week off for some fun time with family. Please feel free to browse our archives for some past adventures. Easin’ Along will return next week for stories and pictures about our week with our precious grandchildren.
Everyone has them…drawers and boxes full of them. I’m talking about old pictures, slides, and home movies just sitting there waiting for you to fulfill that promise you made to yourself. “Self” you said, “as soon as you retire, you’re going to organize all of those pictures into albums”. Sure!
Some of you veryorganized types may have kept that promise and placed all of those precious photographs in great albums and even look at them once in a great while, but at least you have it done. Now the albums are sitting on a shelf or, like us, in a closet somewhere after the downsize move. But what about the slides?
Helen (adorable wife) and I have almost 1,500 slides that we took over 40 years ago and desperately needed to do something with them. Many of these slides were captured in the years just after we were married and moved to Germany for my first assignment in the Army. Helen’s father suggested that we take slides instead of photographs because they were easy to store and we could have prints made from the better ones if we wanted to share or frame them. That’s what we did.
We traveled throughout Europe in those years and took copious amounts of pictures and stored them in projector trays of 100 slides. Somewhere along the way, slides fell out of vogue and we stopped taking them. Also, we had put enough of our friends to sleep watching our slide shows that we finally put the projector up and the slides have been resting in storage ever since. It was time to do something about that because I was very fearful that time and temperature had destroyed some great memories.
A couple of years ago, a local film processor advertised a special service of converting slides to digital images. I boxed up the slides and took them in only to have them call me a few days later to tell me that my slide trays would not fit their converter and that I would have to transfer my slides to their trays – all 1300 of them. Moreover, that service was going to cost me over $300. The slides came back home.
Two weeks ago I received an email from Amazon announcing the annual Prime Day where Amazon Prime customers could save lots of money on Amazon merchandise. When Prime Day arrived, I was scrolling through some of the advertised items and came upon a device which converted slides, film negatives, and 8mm movies to digital images. The Wolverine F2D Mighty Converter is normally $129 but was on sale during Prime Day for $95. I ordered one immediately. Helen, in Charleston visiting the grandchildren, ordered one too as a surprise gift. We had a big laugh over that when both arrived via UPS.
Earlier this week I decided it was time try this thing out. After reading through the short manual, I grabbed a box containing the first 100 slides we ever took and began feeding them into the converter. The images can be stored in the device and later transferred to a computer via USB cord or stored on an SDHC card and transferred through a card reader. I had a spare 8gb SDHC card so I loaded it into the Mighty F2D (link here) and began scanning.
This thing really works! It should be noted that the first slides we have were taken on an old Kodak camera that’s probably displayed in a museum somewhere as a relic of the past, and that the film was the cartridge type made for the small cameras of that era. Therefore, the quality of the pictures is not anywhere close to what I am able to take today, but the quality cannot be blamed on the converter. The converter does have editing capability, but I prefer to load the pictures on my computer and use the simple editing software that I have there.
I quickly became familiar with the relatively easy steps of feeding the slides into the converter and in about two hours I had converted, edited, and stored 500 slides. I probably would have accomplished this a little faster if I had not spent so much time viewing the pictures after I had processed them. It really was fun to go back 40 years and relive a lot of great memories. I have about 800 more slides to convert and therefore a few more memories to relive, but this is a retirement activity I would recommend to anyone.
So, if you made that promise to self to do something about all those boxes of pictures and slides, it’s time to act. The memories are waiting for you. Pictured below are a few of ours.
On Sunday morning a local TV station presented a feature on the sunflower fields at a nature park in our city. When I say fields, I mean fields, as in acres of sunflowers. This looked like a great opportunity for Easin’ Along so, after church, I hitched Midnight (my bicycle) up to Sophie (my truck) and lit out for Ijams Nature Center.
Ijams Nature Center is a 300 acre urban green space that is dedicated to all things nature. It has over twelve miles of hiking trails and a large water-filled quarry for swimming and kayaking. The nature center has been in existence for many years and on most travel and visitor guides for our area it is ranked among the top three “must see” attractions. Nevertheless, until about two months ago, I had never visited.
Our church held an outing there in late spring and since I had never availed myself of the opportunity to see what everyone was talking about, I told Helen (adorable wife) that we should go. Fortunately, I took my camera with me and many of the pictures for this posting were taken on that visit.
On that visit we arrived and joined a small group of fellow church members gathered to walk the River Trail which would lead us along the banks of the Tennessee River. Our guide was a very pleasant man named Lyn Bales. This very knowledgeable gentleman would be better described as a Naturalist. Lyn did an outstanding job of describing the various species of trees and other plant life we encountered along the trail. He answered all of our questions and pointed out trail highlights.
Since I am always curious about what leads someone to do whatever it is that they do, I asked Lyn to tell me how he became a Naturalist at the center. He was glad I asked. Lyn told me that he once had an office job (I can’t remember where) and that he volunteered at the center until one day he was offered the Naturalist position. He said he leapt at the opportunity and never looked back. He loves what he does and it showed.
The River Trail was a delightful experience and we were in no hurry to move along. We came across a couple in a boat out for a little fishing, but hopefully we didn’t disturb them. After we came away from the river, we walked to Meade’s Quarry where visitors are able to swim or kayak in the large spring fed lake. Kayaks are available for rent at the shop adjacent to the Quarry.
Meade’s Quarry
The trail took us to the ropes course where visitors can test their rappelling skills or try their hand at the zipline that had recently been constructed. We watched as a couple of eager young rope enthusiasts made their way safely along the zipline. Our tour along the trail soon concluded and we thanked Lyn for his excellent presentation and he left in search of another group to tutor. The world needs more folks like Lyn.
Having made one trip to Ijams, I was looking forward to a return trip, and so were a lot of others…
The sunflower fields are actually not a part of the nature center, but are within walking distance of the parking lot at Meade’s Quarry. The flowers were planted by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) as a means of giving food and shelter to the wildlife in the area. The sunflowers were planted to attract birds, bees, and butterflies as well as deer and other animals. They attract people too!
I was fortunate to find a parking place as a family was pulling out of the lot when I arrived…better to be lucky than good I always say. I pulled Sophie into the space and unhitched Midnight for a ride along the trail with my camera in the saddlebag (uh, basket—got a little carried away there). Slowly, I worked my way around the walkers and made it to a huge field of sunflowers. The flowers were planted in thick rows and some were now about six feet tall. These big flowers were stunning and I wanted to get the best picture of them as possible so I waded into the rows with my camera strapped to my shoulder. The blossoms were as big as dinner plates and the bees were busily working them over. They looked to be at or near their peak blooming period. Please enjoy them with me.
Bee on Sunflower
Midnight and I made it back to Sophie and left, but this was a huge treat. Hope you enjoyed it.
I’ll be Easin’ Along.
