Family Photos From 1960-1978

Every Mother's Day the family gets their hands dirty around Nan's place to keep it in good working order. At 87 and living on 25 acres, the chores around the house can feel a little overwhelming at times. Once the hard work is done, we treat ourselves to a home cooked feast and quench our hard earned thirst with some cold beers.

Nan had mentioned a while back that she had a load of old 35mm slides that Russ (my pop whom I never had the opportunity to meet) had taken between 1960-1978. After some russ-tling around, Nan pulled out a giant container filled with slides. There were hundreds (approx. 600-700 slides). Nan also managed to get the old projector up and running too to show me some of the slides. She fired up the projector and at that moment I was transported to another time. I was absolutely speechless at how beautiful, quirky, charming, funny, emotional and well composed these shots were. I couldn't shake this feeling that needed to do something with the shots, in memory of Russ; to give these shots a permanent place in the family; to help celebrate such a fascinating time in history; to give Nan, my mum and my aunty an object that marks a wonderful and joyous time in their lives. So I have decided to create a limited edition book to hold these moments of time. This is all a Work In Progress. Titles, layouts and images will no doubt change a million times before I'm completely happy wth it, but I'm pretty excited to get the ball rolling on this project.

I have scanned approx. 330 images out of about 600-700 images with the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 at 1800dpi. This machine is brilliant. It comes with software that increased my efficiency 10 fold. It has been a very time consuming process scanning in all the individual shots, but when I think about the end goal, it's all part of the process. 

Below are just some snippets of the design. I want the images on each spread to tell a story; to have a relationship; to project personality; to bring the images to life. 

This is just the beginning of what I believe will be quite a long undertaking to get right. There is still a lot of writing, image selection, chapter planning to be done, but I'm pumped for it.