New Toy Tuesday!

I have a new favorite toy. It's not new new, as in I just got it today. It's been sitting in a box for about 3 months now. But now, today, it's hooked up and *new*. And useful. Very useful.

This year I made a goal to get my photography stuff in order, and begin doing photography again. Getting my stuff in order included purchasing a new fancy pants digital camera. Digital camera's mean 35mm film and all the freaking negatives that come with them are a thing of the past. My past. Only I have about 4 THOUSAND negatives. Sitting, doing nothing but taking up space. I'm not generally a negative keeper, I used to like to throw them away. Then when I needed to find a particular negative for my photography card making days, I couldn't. Thus started the plan...granted this was 7 years ago that this plan was formulating in my big head, but formulating it was.

Now back then, I had no idea what to do with all the negatives, so I did what any Type A personality would. I categorized them, put them in fancy negative page protectors, and organized them by event, year, photography or whatever I felt. I have 10 3" three ring binders bursting at the seams with negatives. I averaged it out tonight. One 3" three ring binder holds approximately 75 page protectors. Each page protector holds 7 rows of negatives. Each row of negatives are 5 negatives. Do the math with me will ya? 75 pages X 35 negatives a page X 10 binders = 26,250 negatives. My God.

So my new toy in order to help me with me newly found ginormous number of negatives is a negative scanner. Can I get a YEEE HAW?

Here's the catch. I couldn't afford, or rather didn't realize, that the one I really wanted scanned an entire 5 strips of negatives (25 at a time). Instead I bought one that only does TWO negatives at a time. Not two strips. Two negatives. Do you know how long I'll be here?

Well, let me tell you. I've averaged it out to be 15 seconds for each 2 negatives. So that's 13,125 negatives (that's 26,250 divided by 2 since I can do 2 at a time). Then 13, 125 times 15 - because that's 15 seconds per 2 negatives, then divided by 60 ( so I can get it in hours) = 3,281.25 hours. Huh? Wait, did I do something wrong...because that equals 136 days.

If my math is right, and I'm sure there's some mathy person out there who will tell me it isn't - please tell me it isn't. It's going to take me 1/3rd of a year to get this done. Ugh.

Now, I guarantee as I'm going through negatives I'll not scan them all. I mean ones of XBF and Evil XBF will have to be shredded. It's the only right thing to do. Photos of myself that are hideous will have to be shredded as well. I suppose I could go as far and shred any photos of friends who have dumped me and moved on to better friends. So basically in the end I have - well a few less.