6FPS V8#9: Digitizing the Past

6FPS
Written By Chuq Von Rospach

E-mail: chuqvr@gmail.com • Site: https://chuq.me

BlueSky: (https://bsky.app/profile/chuq.bsky.social)

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

One morning you wake up, look out the window and think “wow. it’s fall”. As a photographer you’re always aware of the quality of light to some degree or another, and every year, you have a day where you’re looking outside, and you think “yeah, it’s fall”. The light seems softer and more diffuse, and it’s purely subjective, of course, but every year, this happens to me.

We’re seeing the changes with the birds. Fall migration is upon us. Here at the house our summer Juncos have left, and the winter ones are just now slowly to arrive. The Grosbeaks and Tanagers are the last to show up to breed, and usually among the first to take off again. The other day I went and did my birding circuit watch/listen around the property and only found 14 species — remember that I had a whopping 31 just a couple of months ago.

Where we were refilling the bird feeder 2-3 times a week, all of a sudden it’s been over ten days and the thing is still a third full. And the alder tree at the top of the driveway, always the first tree to start changing color, is showing the first hints of yellow.

It’s fall.

I’ve started my duties as Vice President of Kitsap Audubon Society, which in some ways feels like my job is now attending meetings (in fact, attending as many committee meetings as possible is in the job description). I’ll be working with three committees — outreach, conservation and the tech team — although we’re still sorting out exactly what the priorities and where the focus of my time will be. At a rough guess, 60% of my effort will be in outreach priorities overall,.

I am taking on a role in helping to organize the Christmas Bird Counts, and I expect to lead teams on the counts this year. I also am looking to organize some group outings, and more on that once I firm things up.

It’s a good bunch of people I enjoy working with and being around, and it’s a great cause so I’m happy my time and energy is being directed there. We’ll see what we can accomplish over the next year or few. One thing we’re really trying to dig into is how to make what we do more accessible to the physically limited, and that’s been an interesting and challenging thing to dig into.

One aspect of my work in outreach is likely going to involve a higher profile on the social networks, which has me pondering whether it’s time to expand myself back onto the socials again personally. I’ve been in a mode where I’m happy doing what I do with and for the people I’m connected with, and my public side of things has been pretty quiet — but I’m starting to feel like I want to get out there a bit and contribute more to the public conversation.

The challenge is that the socials, these days, have gotten pretty angry and so much of them today aren’t conversations, but bullhorns — everyone yelling, nobody listening. It’s so much harder to get noticed and get useful feedback, so I’m hesitant to invest the time to try to wade in again.

I expect it’d take me a couple of weeks to figure out how to expand and tune what I see (and don’t). But seriously, is it worth my time these days? I honestly can’t decide. Your thoughts?

Vacation Time

Vacation plans have firmed up. After discussion, we decided we preferred spending more time vacationing and less time traveling to the vacation spot so we’re not going to Morro Bay, but instead out to the Oregon Coast, spending a couple of days in Bandon, Newport and Seaside. We originally intended to do that this month, but I got called for Jury Duty the week of September 14, so we pushed it out a bit. I’m hoping the birding will actually be better (more winter birds arriving), but we’re at more risk of bad weather, so hopefully we might get some interesting photography, and not a lot of days where the hotel room is the better option.

In the Workshop

I spent most of the month working on the spice rack project I mentioned last month. I’ve almost finished with the finishing, and so in the next week they’ll be complete and installed in the kitchen. Almost there.

They are made with ash, which required me to do a lot of milling to get everything down to the proper shapes for this. As I write this, I have two coats of that wax/oil finish on them. These are sized to fit nicely in a corner of the kitchen with a lazy susan in the corner itself. Pictures of them once installed.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the results, but they’re not yet at the “I’d give these to someone else to have” stage. This build was a lot more complicated than my valet tray last month, but I think it’s turned out pretty well. There is one change I’d make in retrospect, but to do it, I’d have to go buy another piece of Ash because I don’t have any of the right size, so I’m going to leave it as is.

Next up in the shop? A few projects in, I now see what works well out there (most of it) and where I want to do some improvements, so I think it’s time for some shop infrastructure and some thinking about how best to handle some storage problems I’m running up again. And I have the rest of that cherry wood and a few more trays to build as I do that.

My Favorite Thing (this month)

This month my favorite thing is a book. After spending 50+ hours listening to the Brandon Sanderson book, I wanted something a bit less dense. I have been thinking that it’s about time to re-read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but instead, I ended up grabbing a copy of Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, the first of ten books in the Corwin Cycle of his series of Amber books (there is a second cycle known as the Merlin Cycle with another six books). First published in 1970, this series is classic fantasy that tells the tales of Amber and the family that lives (and fights) there.

The family of Amber can walk through Shadows; Amber is the true reality, and all other worlds are an infinite number of variations of it, including the Earth you are reading this review on.

This first book brings you into the series and helps you understand the universe Zelazny built, and tells the story of Corwin, who awakes at the start of the book with no memory of who or where he is, while he slowly starts to have his memory return and put together the pieces of his past and his links to Amber.

Of course, things are not great in Amber; his father Oberon (the founder of Amber) is missing and his brother Erik has decided to take the throne. Corwin would prefer to have the throne himself.

It’s fascinating to contrast just how tight the world building and how fast the story in this book unfolds. Where the Sanderson book took 55 hours to listen to it via Audible, this book is under six hours long. I’m not suggesting one form is better than the other — they are both quite good — but it’s an interesting comparison between what a “typical” fantasy of 50 years ago was like compared to a modern one.

I’m just about done with book 2 of the series, Guns of Avalon, and I expect to go through all ten books over the next few months — not sure if I’ll re-read the Merlin Cycle as well, or save that for later. But this turned out to be just what I wanted, and I’m enjoying it massively.

Fun bit of trivia from the past: the first time a publisher used me (from my days writing in OtherRealms) as a blurb quote on the paperback of one of the Amber books, and I sent a copy off to Zelazny and still have that copy in my shelves somewhere, I believe. As someone who was still new to the review circuit at the time, having them do that really felt like a confirmation I was doing something worth doing.

See you next issue!

 

What’s New From Chuq

 

Digitizing the Past

I have finished up Phase 1 of a major photography project I started over a year ago — getting all of my old, pre-digital images digitized and on my computer where I can potentially use them — and if nothing else, I can actually look at them again, since they’re no longer in a box in the garage under four other boxes.

I’ve done these digitizing projects before; when my dad died, I was handed the family photo collection, and I ended up curating it, digitizing it, and then distributing it online and on USB sticks to the rest of the family and close friends. The second project was for San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, who had 20+ years of photos they wanted access to and an upcoming celebration they wanted to use them during. That involved close to 2,000 prints, and I delivered them a static web site they could keep on a local computer or put on a web site and search for and download images to use by clicking on them.

In both cases I dd the digitizing myself, using a flatbed scanner, and both of them took a few months to finish — I logged about 150 hours for SFBBO on the project. For this project, I’ve been putting it off for years because I didn't want to commit another 100+ hours to the digitizing, and I finally convinced myself to spend the money to get them digitized, so the only thing I needed to do was the organization.

After doing some research, I ended up choosing Legacybox as the service to do the digitizing. I felt their pricing was decent, and they do the digitizing inside the U.S. rather than offshoring it. They also seem to brand themselves as Kodak Digitizing Box, but all of the processing is done from the same facility in Tennessee. I did a first small batch and then, of course, sat on it for months, and then last June I did a second larger batch, and a final batch in July.

Total number of images digitized across the three batches was 2,832. Total cost of the processing was just under $1000, or about $0.40US per image. My final set of images was about 2,500, because there were duplicates in my collection that I didn’t think to parse out until later, but it’s an interesting question whether the time to find them in the physical copies would have been worth doing (the challenge here is that most of the duplicates were because I stored both prints and negatives, and good luck identifying those by eye).

Can you do this yourself? Definitely. If you are willing to put in the hours, and all you have are prints, then getting yourself something like the Epson Perfection V30 ($119 on Amazon) is a valid option. If, however, you have slides and/or negatives, your options are a lot more limited. There are units that do slide and negative processing, you’ll need to invest in a unit to do those as well. I tested one of the less expensive ones, the Kodak Slide and Scan ($189 on Amazon) and the results were trash, and all the units in that price range seem to be very similar or outright clones of that unit, so you’d need to get a more expensive unit. I haven’t tested it personally, but my recommendation would be to NOT try any of the units that cost less than the Plustek 8200i ($399), so if you have a mix of prints and negatives and slides, you’re quickly talking about more than $500 in costs just to get started, so suddenly, that $1000 cost to hire Legacybox doesn’t seem to harsh. I also after the first batch realized theses places put their serivices on sale a lot, so a bit of patience will pay off by taking advantage of this.

For a project like this, it’s best to look at it as a set of phases. The first phase is collecting and digitizing the images. After that, you also need to commit time to organizing and adding metadata to images, so you have some ability to search on them later. For my SFBBO project, since I was tracking volunteer hours for them, I can note that early in the project, I was spending 10-15 minutes per image to get them digitized, cropped, cleaned up and doing some basic processing — in other words, from hard copy to ready to use. By the end of the project, I’d figured out ways to be more efficient and had that time down to under 5 minutes per image. But when you think about it, 5 minutes per image for 2800+ images is 60 hours of digitizing. A project like this depends on how much time you have, how much your time is worth, For me, it was either hire out the digitizing or never do it, and given the hardware I’d have had to buy to do it, more than worth it.

How much time have I spent on this project? My images were collected in two archive boxes in the garage, so all I had to do was get them ready to ship out — Legacybox works in batches of 25, an I was able to batch up sets of 50 items in ziplock bags, which took me about an hour for each of the three sets I shipped off. Legacybox supplies the boxes and pays for shipping in both directions.

Images ship via ground shipping, so from here to Tennessee took about a week. Legacybox suggest planning for a 4-6 week turnaround, but for my images, everything turned around in 4 days or less after the images were delivered to them. They supply them to you via an online service, which will happily host them for you forever for about $7/month, but you can download them to your local system and cancel the monthly charge. You can also (for $35) have them ship the images to you on a USB stick, which I did; I could have saved 10% of my total cost by skipping this, but I took the belt and suspenders approach here.

The images are returned as JPEGs. Don’t expect massive files, they’re definitely got an appropriate amount of detail from the original. Of the 2800 images I had scanned, one batch of 25 showed signs of sensor dust in the digitizing unit, but overall the quality was quite good.

So, about the cost. I really had two choices. I could have bought a scanner and a slide scanner (about $500 or so) that I’d have zero use for after this project, and spent 100-150 hours doing digitizing and cleanup. Or I could spend about $1000 to hire someone else to do the digitizing, and I spent unde ten hours so far on prepping for shipping, and then downloading and doing review and some initial organizing. I see the trade off as either spending $500 or spending 90 hours of my life welded to a scanner. I see outsourcing this as a relative bargain.

Oh, I realize this will upset some people, but when the images were shipped back to me, I immediately tossed them out. Some might argue I should keep them, bt with the digital versions, I have what I want for the future, and the physical copies are just clutter that will sit in a box until whoever cleans out the house sometime in the future wonders what to do with them (and probably dumpsters them).

The project isn’t done; I still have organizing and metadata to do, and some images need some further cleanup — some are sideways or upside down, negatives and slides often need cropping, and basic cleanup (often no more than the magic “auto” button). A few have discolored over the years, they’ll take more work to restore. I’m estimating another 15-20 hours to get everything the way I want it, but even now, I can at least good chasing an image if I want it. And, of course, figuring out what to put online and how to do it…

So, if you have that box of aging prints stuffed in a closet, consider hauling it out and getting them digitized. There are services that will do the grunt work for you and do a good job of it, and it will make those images useful and accessible for you again, even if the only thing you use them for is sharing with family or embarrassing your kids with their friends. 

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area.

Out a couple of times in August, with the highlights getting some time out at Fay Bainbridge park, watching a couple of baby Osprey practice flying around the nest. It’s times like this that remind me why I do this kind of photography.

They have since fledged and are out on their own. There was also an Osprey nest out near Point No Point, and when I was out there I saw three Osprey out hunting at the same time, so the nest there has fledged successfully as well.

I also, around the first of the month, took Puget Sound Express’s Puffin trip out to Smith Island, and was not disappointed, but the images aren’t ready yet, so we’ll talk more about that next month.

It’s fascinating to wander back into my earlier film days of photography and see how similar my current styles are — in some ways — and how different my photography is in others. Below are three images from the deep past that caught my eye. The first is from the early 1990s on our first trip into Yellowstone National Park. This was on my first (and only) Apple Sabbatical, back when the company gave you six weeks off to rest and recharge every five years.

The second is Half Dome, from Yosemite National Park. An iconic shot but one I still love, and a different image of this hands on the wall in the bedroom — I probably have ten difference variations of this that I’ve taken over the decades.

And the third I from the time Laurie and I were season ticket holders to the San Jose Giants, something we did for about six years, sitting right over the dugout. Minor league baseball is great fun and there are days when I miss it, but I don’t regret making choices on just how many different things to splinter my available time across. This is a fun shot, because it features Dick Dietz — at the time manager of the baby Giants — and Doug Mirabelli, one of the players from those years that went on to have a decent major league career. He was a catcher who played over 500 games in the majors, mostly with Boston where he ended up specializing in catching Tim Wakefield, the knuckleballer. Not a lot of power or offense in hit bat, but the pitchers loved how he caught them and managed the game. My Giants photos would all be from the early to mid 1990’s.

A good number of images in my now-digitized historical catalog are ones that, to be honest, I’d throw away today, but I’m enjoying going through them and trying to sort out the where and when, and it’s fascinating how few of them I can’t place to a location (years is a lot harder).

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Photography

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (August, 2026). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

 

Download an E-book

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

About 6FPS

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2025 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Where to Find Chuq

Chuq Von Rospach

Birder, Nature and Wildlife Photography in Silicon Valley

http://www.chuq.me
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Puffin Run