A family night with colour slides

A few weeks ago we relived an event which is a fond memory from my boyhood – a family night with colour slides.

Equipment

In order to view the slides I needed to obtain a slide projector and so I’ve been looking on eBay over the last few weeks to see what I could find. Slide projectors are really easy to find at the moment, and quite cheap, so I wasn’t really surprised that I could pick up a decent Rollei P35E autofocus projector for only £10. It’s a nice unit which is quite quiet in operation, bright enough to use in a semi dark room and can be remotely controlled with a plug in control, or can be set to automatically change slides over a variable time period.

The next thing I needed was a projection screen. Oddly, these are still quite expensive to pick up from eBay – probably because people still use screens to project movies in home cinema setups, but fortunately the charity my wife works at has a screen which I could borrow for the evening.

Fortunately, when it comes to slides, I still have a lot of the ones my Dad took when we were all growing up and so they were some of the first ones I loaded into the magazine for our journey back in time.

The Night itself

And so to the night itself, which was in part entertaining, in part nostalgic and also in part a disappointment.

It was entertaining and nostalgic for I suppose obvious reasons.

I haven’t seen the slides my Dad took on the big screen for probably 30 years. I’d completely forgotten the impact of seeing them in full size and in such detail. Even the pictures he took on quite cheap cameras were very impressive when seen in this way. I’m  really looking forward to seeing the pictures I took this year on slide film because the cameras I used he could only have dreamt of owning.

The disappointment was because although I remember these evenings as a great family event I couldn’t get my children to join in at all.  It seems that seeing old pictures of your Dad when he was a youngster is just not that interesting when compared to the latest offering on Youtube or Netflix so although they started with the intention of watching, after a few dozen pictures the novelty wore off and they were back to their phones and tablets.

Ah well – perhaps if I’d had the Internet I may not have enjoyed it quite so much all those years ago either!