Bruce Simmonds is on a mission to digitise 50 years’ worth of slides and photos.
Like most ‘grounded’ grey nomads, Bruce Simmonds has suddenly found himself with an awful lot of spare time on his hands … and he intends to use it wisely.
After multiple decades of photographing his family life and his many travels around Australia, Bruce has accumulated a mountain of pictures stored in two giant 80-litre crates. But that’s all about to change.
With the coronavirus pandemic leaving him home alone with wife Margaret, Bruce has set himself the gargantuan task of digitising 50 years’ worth of 35mm slides and photos. The 73-year-old has been fascinated by photography ever since, at the age of eight, he was given a used Kodak Retinette 1A 35mm camera that took 35mm slides.
“I retired in 2003 and did the Big Lap in 2004, still using a Pentax 35mm film camera taking colour photos,” he said. “In about 2005, I started using a digital camera and now have more than 45,000 photos on my hard drives.”
Given the amount of travelling Bruce and Margaret had done prior to 2005, there’s an awful lot of memories still to be digitised.
“Our family started camping about 1984 with a borrowed tent, then progressed to a used tent, to hire caravans, and then we purchased a 30-year-old van, before getting a new van in 2002, and finally our current 18’ Van Cruiser caravan which we bought new in 2015,” said Bruce. “The old slides and photos certainly bring back long forgotten memories, such as, the kids growing up, how skinny I was 40 years ago, and mates scratching their heads trying to put together a borrowed tent with no instructions in our early camping days.”
While Bruce grew up in inner Sydney, he has always felt much more at home in the bush, and he loves the freedom of the open road.
“We just zig and zag with no timetable or real destination just a general direction, north, south or west,” he said. “Margaret and I don’t seem to plan our van trips very well … for example, we were heading up the Matilda Highway towards Mt. Isa, as I had worked there as a young bloke, but we turned off at Winton towards Hughenden and went via Karumba, Burketown and Lawn Hill to Mt Isa and then we decided to head to Birdsville for the races!”
Bruce has been using an old Aldi scanner to help him digitise his photos. “It’s a bit slow but I do have plenty of time at the moment,” he said. “I’ve done about 2,000 slides so far but I do hope to update to a quicker, newer system shortly.”
To digitise the photos that are in albums, Bruce is using a phone app called Photomyne which can photograph multiple photos on one page and automatically separate and crop each photo individually.
“It’s giving me pretty good results,” he said. “Especially as I have albums that have those sticky pages and so it is near impossible to peel the photos off the page without tearing them!”
With the health crisis likely to keep Bruce home for the foreseeable future, he should have plenty of time to work his way through his crates of 35mm photos.
But what then? Is he still hoping to create some more on-the-road memories?
Of course, but in typical Bruce and Margaret style, the plans are decidedly loose.
“When we are allowed out to play again, we will just go somewhere for some time,” said Bruce.
Hobby- contribute to the environment by buying several flowering plants & shrubs..then photo the rewards.Visits by breeding hungry butterflies,bees,sunbirds- is priceless