Happy 29th Wedding Anniversary to Sue Ann and Conrad!

Just over a week ago, Conrad and Sue Ann Spens celebrated their 29th wedding anniversary.  I contacted Conrad to see if he could give me a few photos from their wedding day to post, but so far he has only managed to find a couple and the scans are not very good.  So I have put one of the photos into this post, and when I am able to get hold of more (and do my own scans!) I will add them to the post.

I have known Conrad since junior high school, where we both played the cornet in band.   I have known Sue Ann since college, she lived in the same residence house as both I and my future wife did our senior year at Stanford.  The two of them met at the baby shower for my daughter, and over the years they have become some of our closest friends.

Funny how different things were back when digital did not exist and all photos were recorded using film.  Making copies was a considerably more involved process.  You had to take the negatives to a photo lab and have a print made, which (if you were lucky) could be done in about an hour, but usually meant having to wait a day or two before making the trip back to the lab to pick up the print.  Or if you were brave you could mail your negatives to a lab to have the prints done.  But if anything happened to the negatives you were in serious trouble, since without a negative there was no way to get a good quality copy made of a photo.  I always gave a little speech to couples when they picked up the negatives and prints of their wedding photos, advising them to carefully store the negatives someplace where they could not easily be damaged, to ensure that they could have more prints made at a later time.  So different with digital and the ease of creating back-up files of all the photos today.  Though far too many people either forget or are too lazy to take that simple step!

This photo was taken using what was then state of the art 35mm camera equipment, though the scan quality does not show that.  The actual photo quality is comparable to that of a mid-range digital camera now.  My current digital gear will give resolution as good or better than is available from medium-format film cameras.  I tried to clean this photo up a bit using Photoshop, but didn’t have much success, the scan quality was too low.