I’m up at my Mom’s house this weekend for the first time in a year, and it’s been a great visit so far. We haven’t done much other than visit and eat, and frankly, that’s OK with me.

I went into the basement to move some stuff around and look over the back corner where some water had been collecting. When I’d cleared everything away and sprayed the cinderblock down with bleach, I started sorting through stuff and making a dump pile. One of the things that I was interested in looking over were a box full of 8mm film reels that date back from before I was born. Dad left two projectors behind, a Bell & Howell and an Argus, and chances were 50/50 that one of them still had a functioning bulb. I spent some time before dinner learning how to load the Argus properly, and within about 20 minutes had a reel of our family trip across the country projected on the wall of the living room. He shot a fair bit of movie film: there are  about 20 reels in total, a mixture of 7″, 6″, 5″ and one 3″, which equals out to about eight hours of movies in total.

There are several digitization services out there, one of which is Kodak, who will convert two reels for $70. I think I might send two of the 7″ reels (roughly 28 minutes of footage) out to them and see how good things look.