If placed side by side would they really stretch around the world? Or, if placed one on top of another, tower above Mt. Everest? Probably not, but as we stood in our new Copenhagen apartment and looked at the mountain of boxes that represented our accumulated lives' work in transparencies, it was overwhelming to think that each and every slide needed to be scanned. The very thought was enough to transform us from hip, happening, digital shooters into tired, old photographers with a past.

Every serious photographer over the age of twelve faces the same daunting task: how to transfer a lifetime of chrome and negatives into new digital images. For some it represents no more than the desire to be able to improve favorite old images in Photoshop or to be able to post them to a new home-page; for professionals it is the first step in making available to new markets an archive of past "winners". In short, for us, these slides represent our most valuable "stock" portfolio. They are our 401K in Kodachrome.

We discussed doing it ourselves. We both have horror stories of agencies losing our images in the Bermuda Triangle of their filing systems. And, getting paid? Sometimes it took forever. But, speaking of forever... how long would it take to produce thousands of thousands of high-end scans? And, even after we scanned and cleaned our archive of old slides, we would still need to spend months writing captions and keywords. Would all of our work for the foreseeable future be devoted to our past images? What about all the new projects we want to start?

We talked about it forever, delaying the decision and, yet, the problem didn't get any smaller. Then one day by chance, we happened to mention it to one of our new friends at Pictopia in Emeryville, CA. (Pictopia was scanning some of our old slides to make prints for an upcoming show of our photos at Montana, a wonderful store in Copenhagen that showcases its own Danish modern furniture. (We love the idea of juxtaposing their design and our contemporary photography.) Bryan Bailey, our digital imaging specialist at Pictopia suggested we speak with Peter Menzel (www.menzelphoto.com ), a colleague of ours who had just decided to use a firm in Mumbai, India to scan his archive of images. After a quick phone call, we agreed to come and visit with Peter the next morning.

Peter showed us the 100 mg, 8 bit drum-scans that he ordered from India. He showed us comparison scans made by a high-end slide scanner. Within minutes we knew Peter had shown us the future of our old transparencies. We were convinced that we wanted to hire Adnetinfosystems (our contact is Rohini Babber) to scan our archive. Later, when we learned that both Getty Images and Corbis were using the same firm, we knew we were on the right track.

We contacted the team in Mumbai and learned that their Heidelberg Drum Scans run 24/7. We ordered some test scans and decided that for our purposes the 50mg, 8 bit RGB Tiff scans would serve. We were especially pleased to learn that the firm could also caption and keyword the images in the style of the big stock houses. Suddenly, the future looked golden again.

There is only one problem that we've found with this approach. Last month as we flew from Denmark to the States, mid-air we emailed Adnetinfosystems that we were ready to receive some of our finished files. Moments later images began to flood our computer. We quickly transferred them to our external hard drive, did some polishing in Photoshop, and then uploaded the finished scans to the Geographic Image collection in DC. We were amazed at the speed of our workflow. The problem? No more time for drinks and a movie on the plane.

© KEENPRESS - Sisse Brimberg & Cotton Coulson [contact] [bio]