Making do

Something that was emphasized in past generations, at least, was getting along/getting the job done with what was available at hand. To me, most decades have been accompanied by less need to do so. I have felt that with each passing decade I/we have had so much more with which to cope. I have been taking advantage of some of the marvels of modern-day life without giving it much of a thought. To wit: For the past decade or two, I have been scanning much of what can be scanned in order to let go of physical paperwork - including printed photographs. The project has had its challenges since succeeding generations of our family have been infected with the need to retain the physical evidence of our existence. Oh, me.

Something that has presented a challenge is the fact that previous generations of Hunky Husband's and my families seemed to favor large format photographs. Somehow, that predilection skipped a generation as I always preferred 5"x7" format in portraits for display rather than the 8"x10" favored by my mother or the 16"x20" favored by my great-grandparents, for instance. How to scan such large photographs? Like most of us, I suspect, my scanner plate accepts nothing larger than 8.5"x14".

As I am archiving photos and documents for my own use, I am not bound by the requirements under which professional archivists must labor. Whatever is acceptable to me, works. Thus, I have two work-arounds for the large format issue: 1) photographing the original using my iPhone (I no longer maintain an autonomous camera) and 2) using Microsoft Paint to join together smaller pieces of large format photos and documents - at which I am anything but accomplished. 

For instance, the photo at the top is an unedited product of my having hand-held my iPhone to photograph a large format photograph of HH's mother from 1935. Good enough for me! As an illustration of piecing together parts of a photo to produce the larger whole, I present another copy of my beloved mother-in-law's photo, below. Also, good enough for me!

Note to Dudette, who is now in possession of the original, large-format photograph: I appreciated your and WichiDude's visit, yesterday, and am posting this to show you what I meant when I said that you would be able to detect the piecing together of the two scans I had made of the photo. The splice is evident, but not (to me) objectionable. (Click on photo to enlarge.)