More old photos

For the last five years or so, I've had a project which I've been promising myself I will do, and that is to scan all of the pre-digital camera photos that I have accumulated over the last three or four decades. I recently purchased a small photo scanner called the "Pandigital Photolink" and just started testing it out. It's very convenient and fast (I think it takes only about three seconds to scan one photo), but I'm not yet convinced it's the way to go. The quality is a bit shaky (of course, the quality of prints from some of those cheap film cameras back then is also pretty shaky), and the scanner has some annoying quirks, like not wanting to scan dark images (it tends to cut them off at weird spots). I'll have to do some comparison tests with a flatbed scanner to see if it makes sense to go that way, which would be a lot more complicated and work-intensive, but might give better results.

In any event, the reason I mention this is that in testing the little photo scanner last night, I grabbed a box of photos sitting next to my chair and pulled out a few to test with, and they brought back some nice memories.

Back in 1986, when we moved Mirage Studios from Sharon, CT up to Northampton, MA, my wife and I ended up living in a small apartment in Haydenville, a small town about seven miles outside of Northampton. I think we lived there for a couple of years before moving into the first house we bought in Leeds, MA.

It was while living there that Mike Dooney came for one of his visits (before moving here permanently a few years later), and here he is in my tiny studio in that Haydenville apartment.



If I remember correctly, Mike split his time during that visit between my place and Kevin's, and I'm pretty sure while he stayed with me he was helping to ink zombies (among other things) in issue #8 of the original Volume 1 TMNT comics.

Sometime in early 1987, with snow still lingering on the sides of the roads, Jim Lawson showed up at our apartment, pleased as punch with his new motorcycle, a Honda 700 Nighthawk.



Jim offered me a chance to ride it, and it just so happened that although I hadn't ridden a motorcycle or had a motorcycle license in over a decade, I fell just within the Registry of Motor Vehicles' time rules in this sense -- I could go in and renew my motorcycle license simply by taking a written test. If I had waited another two months, I would have had to go through the whole road test thing again.

So when Jim came up with his new bike, I got to take a spin on it, just around the neighborhood. But it immediately awakened the love of motorcycles that had been slumbering inside me for a decade, and within a few weeks I had bought a new bike, a Kawasaki KLR650. And I never looked back. Thanks, Jim! -- PL