Do you know what I am not?

Answer: Methodical.

Between 1997 and early 2009 I shot hundreds of rolls of reversal (slide) film. My usual culprit is Fuji Velvia 50, a super-lush film that has been snarkily labeled “Disneychrome” by its detractors for its almost unbelievable saturation. Heck, maybe it was an indiscretion of my youth, but I loved the stuff. Still do, really. Yes, I’ve moved on. I’ve taken up with digital. But it’s not forgotten.

Being a successful photographer means a certain effort must be expended in the left-brained pursuits: cataloging, storing, archiving, filing. I find this mostly unbearable. Everything from my chrome years is nominally stored: slotted in chronological order into about 15 industrial-sized three-ring binders in my (finished, climate-controlled) attic. Rolls are in order and in protective plastic sheets. The lab I use dates and numbers the slide mounts, so that ups things a notch. And that’s where my organization strategy ends.

I own a high-end Nikon film scanner, a wedding gift (brilliant) from my mother. This has been simple: Whenever I need digital access to a particular shot, I hunt it down, scan it and upload it to wherever it needs to go. Scanned images in various resolutions and degrees of correction litter external drives throughout the house. My slides sit and wait for me to get around to the “big project” that I’ve been meaning to do for years: Organize. It is the photographic equivalent of a garage full to the rafters of junk-filled cardboard boxes.

A week ago I had a commercial inquiry into a shot I’d taken on medium format Velvia. I dug up the image (I kind of know where things are…), dragged my scanner out of storage and wired things up.

Zoinks! The software to drive my scanner–Nikon Scan 4–crashed on launch! Every time! Even after reboot! Even after install! A quick circuit of the complainer-net brought a rather tragic enlightenment: Nikon, perhaps because they hate their customers and have black, black hearts, have discontinued OS X support for the Nikon Coolscan 9000. Well, I’m sure that’s not the official line. The official line is more like: Buy the $500 SilverFast software. But it translates more like: Hey, remember that $2200 scanner? Well, it just expired. We think this is very funny. Hah hah hah. Specifically: There is no version of Nikon Scan 4–the only available free, functional software for the scanner–that will run in OS X Leopard, and there are no plans to create one.

What ensued reminded me very much of about 1997, which is ironic, because I was in digital pursuit of images created at just about that time. At one point we had David’s desktop booted into Windows 7 running Nikon Scan 4 in 32-bit emulation. Loud sound of fail: While you can run 32-bit programs in Windows 7, your drivers had better be 64-bit. I was waiting for the part where we had to adjust IRQ switches. It was like that.

The final setup: We have a Mac Mini in the basement we use to drive our entertainment media. It’s a humble and reliable machine, and we never got around to upgrading it to Leopard. My entire day has been sucked into calibrating, organizing, file naming conventions, downloadings of trial software (it’s looking like Lightroom might win for me).

If nothing else, this will force me to deal with this. My time with a usable scanner is limited. In the next while, you will likely see new images coming from me, ones you perhaps haven’t seen but have existed for many years. I hope it will be interesting to you. Here are a couple from some of my very first rolls of slide film, to whet your visual appetite.

One of the very first photographs I ever took on slide film.

Night Skyline, Vancouver, BC

Multnomah Falls, 1998