Feeling bored one rainy day I hauled up two large bins of photos, slides and negatives from the basement just to have a look around. To my surprise, I liked quite a few of the images!

However, I really wanted to scan both the negatives and the slides so I had a digital version to work with. On a whim I contacted the library and they had just received a slide and negative scanner to lend out. Perfect!

I spent the next few evenings feeding strips of negatives and slides into the scanner, making a 6MB version of each image. They are not perfect scans, but now I finally have a digital copy of the images, some of which I have never seen any larger than 23mm ✕ 34mm on my light table!

I’ve shared some of those scanned images below.

Ozark Mountains

Growing up in St. Louis, the Ozark Mountains were never that far of a drive.  Fortunately I had a car during my last two years of high school and was able to venture to some very cool places. These images were all shot on either Kodachrome or Fujichrome some time in the mid-90s.

Western US

After high school, my friends and I made a couple of backpacking trips to the mountains and deserts of the US. This included trips to New Mexico, Colorado and Texas. These images were all shot on either Kodachrome or Fujichrome sometime in the mid-90s.

Appalachia

I didn’t shoot too much during the short time I was living in North Carolina. However, I think you could spend a lifetime shooting the mountains and rivers in and around the Great Smoky Mountains.

South Korea

After moving to Korea, my access to good slide film was limited so I switched to whatever negative film the local photo shop was selling. As I perused these 4✕6 photos I was struck at how much I saw my style in them. It felt great to give these images a little TLC in Lightroom and bring out the vision I saw when I pressed the shutter button so many years ago. These are all from the early 2000s just before going digital.