Slides

My parents must have thousands of them: those wonderfully small, cardboard-framed cells of vivid color known as "slides". If you're young enough, the only slide you know of that has to do with pictures belongs in PowerPoint. But the slides I'm referring to are something far more amazing. Maybe I'm a little odd, but there's something almost magical about holding one of these little beauties in your fingers and lifting it to the light to behold the brilliant images captured on film long ago. I absolutely love my digital cameras, but there is definitely a uniquely rich quality to good film photography that digital technology hasn't quite captured yet.

I couldn't begin to count how many evenings I spent as a child laying on the floor of our darkened living room looking at family pictures projected onto a glittering fabric screen. I can still hear the whirr of the projector fan as it cooled the bulb that was providing the needed pathway to fling our memories through the air onto the screen. And then there was the satisfying mechanical "cha-chunk" as the carousel of slides rotated and the metal sliding armature would remove one picture and insert another. (Of course, I wasn't thinking such fanciful thoughts at the time, but nostalgia has a way of making the mundane poetic.)

For me, slides are like little treasures and they fascinate me as an adult the way my View Master did as a kid.

I think I'm going to stop by my parents' house and raid that old closet downstairs and see what kind of celluloid gems I can find.