David Campbell’s picture perfect blast from the past
When Trevor Long stopped by the Today show, David Campbell promised it to be “the best thing that’s ever happened on this show.”
And while David himself may have had a few things to say afterwards - with his past mullet being exposed to the world - Trevor certainly had a lot to offer viewers, outlining a whole host of options for turning their old photographs into digital keepsakes.
“If you’re like me,” David began, “and I still have a lot of my old photos … I don’t trust clouds, I miss photos … and they’re all stored in our phones and it freaks me out.”
“Photos like this one, David?” Trevor asked, an old photo of David and his school friends - John and Glen - on display in his hands.
“That freaks everyone else out,” was David’s immediate response.
The image saw the three at what appeared to be a formal event, two of them even sporting waistcoats, but it was David’s remarkable haircut that caught their attention, and their amusement.
“That is a mullet, ladies and gentlemen,” Trevor declared, to Today co-host Sylvia Jeffreys’ laughter.
From there, Sylvia went on to explain that their goal was to “keep photos like that alive because we should never forget that mullet.”
And that’s where Trevor came in, noting that he had many photo albums at home, and that “you kind of think that you’re going to lose those memories.”
The solution, he believes, is in taking them to the digital sphere, where they can be kept ‘forever’.
First on his list of digitising options was an application called Google Photo Scan. He went on to demonstrate how all users need to do is “point the phone at the photo”, wait for the flash which they may find “a bit weird”, and for dots to appear “on each corner”.
Using David’s mullet throwback as his example, he waited for the picture to scan, and then revealed the results: a near-perfect replica on his phone that was “now Facebook shareable” and “also just something you can keep in your digital library”.
Next up was the most efficient - and most expensive at over $600 - of Trevor’s solutions, with Epson’s Fastfoto scanner. The photos were inserted in bulk into the machine, and deposited at the other end in rapid succession after enhancing and saving the images to his computer - quite unlike a scanner, though similar in process, where each photo must be manually attended to throughout the entire job. According to Trevor, the Epson device had the potential to do “a hundred a minute”.
Last but not least came the answer for those with an awful lot of old film negatives lying around. The Kodak Slide ‘n’ Scan, he demonstrated, required users to slide film through the device, with each image appearing on a small screen at the front. After pressing the button on top just once, the picture would be saved onto a memory card, ready to be moved wherever its owner desired.
“It’s a little bit of a manual process,” Trevor allowed, “but as you push it through [and] press the button, it saves it on a memory card, kind of like the memory card you have on your digital camera. Put it into your computer, and again, you choose what you do with your photos.”
And for those worried about the cost of some of the products he’d showcased? Trevor’s answer was simple: sell them.
From there there was only one concern left to address, as David was showing his mullet pic to the camera, with Trevor asking “can you grow that back?”
David, laughing, shot back, “I wish I could!”
Images: Nine