One of my goals going forward is to take more video of our lives.
When I spent a whole days going through photo books from my mom’s flooded house, I was surprised to see how much the photos shifted in quality. The older photos were actually better. Brownie photos from the fifties and sixties had better color with sharper focus. The seventies were generally out of focus and sepia-brown. This might have been a byproduct of the cellophane photo books my mom used, but the clarity of the pre-seventies never returned.
80s photos were more clear, but often had red-eye and were still out of focus. Colors were generally faded. The 90s were slightly better, and in the 2000s my family shifted to digital so those photos had a new series of issues.
In 1985, my dad got a VHS camcorder, and we have video of several family trips and a lot of Boy Scout activities. VHS still leaves a lot to be desired, but the amount of information in those videos compared to the photos is amazing.
Watching video from a movie night with family friends, I find myself looking around the people at our living room, the bedrooms, a quick shot into the bathroom. All the details I had forgotten about.
That version of my childhood ended in 1997 when my parents divorced. I had left the house for the army at that point anyway.
In looking at my recent photo collection, currently in Google Photos, Flickr, iCloud and OneDrive, I’ve always felt good about the hundreds of photos I capture a year. Between 2010 and 2020 though, it seems I hardly took any video. I’m missing video of a good portion of my oldest girl’s life, and that makes me sad. All that extra information about her and they way she talked, carried herself, her expressions beyond just a photo, and then our house at the time, everything… I don’t have that.
So I’m going to work on taking more video.
Video is much better now, and requires more storage space.
When my oldest was a baby, I spent many hours in iMovie editing movies and adding soundtracks. Now I wish I hadn’t done any of that. The music gets in the way. I want to hear the squeal of her walker on the tile floor, her clapping, the sound of a radio in the other room. I don’t have the original video anymore, unfortunately.
In terms of workflow, I have an unRaid server with 90tb of storage, a Canon m50 and a Canon vixia G70. So I definitely have the tools to make this happen.
Why: to preserve memory of our family and lives.
How: Video cameras
What: Carry the camera, use the camera, get used to grabbing bits of video outside of special occasions and uploading the video
When: daily. Upload video nightly.
