John Brown = Magnificent Blog

...Fabulous blog, illustrated even. Keep up the good work. You are speaking for me.

Hello All: Glad to be on Hello! (as Keith Olbermann calls it on countdown.msnbc.com).

I have undertaken project of a lifttime: organizing and editing maybe 3000 slides I took in 22 years of travelling from country to country in the foreign service.

I would be most appreciative to hear from people who have put together large slide show. (Mine will be limited to 20 minutes per segment, about as much as a person can tolerate before MEGO.) The slides have to be segregated by year, put in files, color-corrected, possibly narrated and put on the net and on cd's.

The adventures I had in Iceland, Calcutta, provincial Vietnam, Saigon, Poland, Cameroon, San Francisco, and Thailand were terrific, and I don't want to lose this opportunity to share them with members of my family and the (!) "worldwide community"(!).

The rating will be "G" for "general" audiences, though I have never taken any slides which might cause embarassment. On the other hand, as a bachelor in the foreign service, I met a number of interesting ladies, and I am sure they would rather not stumble on their portraits on the internet.

One last note: for those who might have boxes of analog slides in their closets and no way to digitize them, I used PhotoSolve as in http://photosolve.com. The guy who runs it, Paul Williams, talked me through assembling what looks like a telephoto lense. One inserts a slide at one end, points the digital camera and extension towards a light source (without the flash on) and a perfect digital copy is made of the slide. For those who scan slides professionally, the cost of a scanner is 600-900 dollars, but my PhotoSolve ready to go cost a total of 150 dollars. Also, the attachment unscrews easily and one has one's regular digital camera, in my case, a refurbished Canon A95.