Saving Faces

By Tak Sato

One of my earliest childhood memories is waking up to the smell of vinegar and sulfur and looking up at photos hanging from a crisscross web of clotheslines over my head.

I grew up in Japan, where space comes at a premium; our living room was converted into our sleeping quarters each night. My dad was a photographer and developed photos there after my brother and I went to sleep.

Those vinegary smells made me curious, enough that I’d stay awake at the risk of being yelled at. Instead of scolding me because it was past my bedtime, Dad showed me how he developed and printed photographs. The chemicals smelled like vinegar; he dried his wet prints on the clothesline. I was hooked and soon replaced my mom as dad’s weekend darkroom assistant. Photography became my lifelong hobby.

As Boomers or members of Generation X, we’ve seen photography change from film to digital in a few decades.

In the early digital photo era, taking pictures with a single-purpose device like a digital camera required either transferring our pictures to personal computers for safekeeping or printing at home or taking our photo discs or cards to a store for printing. With the advent of smartphones, we’re able to take photos and videos and store them on our phones or in the cloud.

In the analog era, we stored family photos in wallets, albums and shoeboxes. Today we send them through text, email and social media platforms directly from our smartphones.

I share digital photos/ videos in the above manner but I also print digital photos — enlarging and framing favorites. I occasionally make photo books online, getting them printed, bound and delivered. They make perfect coffee table books, keep favorite family memories close by and are easy to share with guests. I still go to the trouble of preserving my Kodak Moments that way because looking for a picture can be a frustrating needle-inthe-haystack expedition, especially if you’re not in the habit of curating your digital photos and videos.

If you want to preserve or digitize old photos or family videos on VHS tapes (remember those?), your local library can often help. I browsed Westlake Porter Public Library’s website, my favorite neighborhood library, and saw that patrons can reserve a station equipped with digitizing equipment. With a little work, you can make DVDs from old VHS tapes or digitize 8mm or Super 8 films and save them to a secure digital (SD) card.

For the last several visits home to Japan, I’ve scanned print photos when I couldn’t find the original negatives or digital files. Here’s a tip for digitizing print pictures using a smartphone: use the free PhotoScan app from Google. You can find it in the Play Store (Android smartphones and tablets) and the App Store (iPhones and iPads). The results from the PhotoScan app are better than taking a picture off the print because you don’t get the glare from the flash on your smartphone.