Saturday, February 27, 2010

Iconic

I mentioned before the photograph project I'm doing.  One of my favorite pics was of a young tanned girl in an old fashioned bathing suit and swimming cap.  She was sitting on a large metal ice chest that had "Pepsi-Cola" written on the side in red.  What really pulled the whole thing together was that she was also drinking a Pepsi while sitting there.  The colors, the style, the Pepsi logo.....  we couldn't have created anything better to package all that is Pepsi in a single picture.  It's gotten the most hits out of any of the pictures of Chuck's that I've uploaded to flickr. 

Well, yesterday, I was looking at my stats for my account and noticed a few unusual referrers.  One I recognized because of the "pepsi" name in the site address - www.pepsimax.dk - obviously a Pepsi site of some sort.  And the other was www.sonico.com.  Upon further investigation, turns out this is also a Pepsi site, I just didn't recognize it by "sonico".  I discovered these sites were showing Chuck's Pepsi pic to their website visitors.  I LOVE THAT!  I got very excited about that and had to share....   More later....    :)


Sunday, February 21, 2010

Photographic Documentary

Lately, I have been more into my photography than anything else.  I started using flickr and uploading my pics to share with anyone interested.  I joined various flickr groups, based on interest....One is a group for pictures of antique signs.  Another is a group for self-taught photographers.  And yet another for pictures of abandoned buildings.  There are literally millions of groups to choose from.  And now I have another photography project I'm passionate about.

Before I explain further about the project, however, I should set the background for how this came about.  After my husband's mother passed away last June, Lyle temporarily went to live with his step-dad Chuck to help him get stronger and back on his feet.  A few months ago, Lyle found some old slides of pictures Chuck had taken spanning from the fifties to late seventies using two different Zeiss Ikon 35mm cameras.  The pictures cover events from his college days at University of Idaho, time in the armed forces in Korea and Japan, as well as the first ten years or so he was married to Lyle's mom.   Lyle picked about 30 of his favorite slides and showed me the next time I was out to visit.  I absolutely fell in LOVE with these pictures.  We found many more slides after that, and they were ALL a very poignant photographic documentary of this man's life. 

And now we come to the photography project.  Chuck has given me permission to share the pictures on Flickr.  Here is the plan:  Lyle and I are going to have all the images transferred to CD.  The original slides and a CD set of the copied images will be retained by Lyle's family.  I will retain a second copy of the images and upload about half of them onto flickr.  I say 'half' because out of the lot, that's about how many I would comfortably share on flickr based on the content - i.e., the photos that are either iconic of the times or are of places and events that can be appreciated by a much wider audience than just myself, my husband and our immediate family.  The remaining half are private family photos that will and should be kept just for family and will not be uploaded to flickr.

It's Sunday night and I just came back from visiting Lyle and Chuck and I've brought all 700+ slides with me.  I will have them copied onto CDs sometime in the next few days, uploaded to flickr sometime within the next couple weeks and return the slides and copies the next time I visit.   I am very grateful to Chuck for trusting me with all the original slides and allowing me to share his phenomenal pictures.   I hope others enjoy the his pictures as much as I do.