Day 43: Six Kodak Slide Carousels

You know, those round trays that go on top of slide projectors. They hold the slides that are, say, the photos from your Aunt Gloria's trip to Switzerland back in '73. I have a ton of these, back from when I used to teach college photography and used them for illustrating my lectures. Even then slides, once the absolute gold standard for image sharpness and color fidelity. were becoming a rarity. In the six short intervening years since I last taught these slide trays have gone from essential to extraneous, since now I use a digital projector for such things.

I offered these on Freecycle thinking that I would be lucky to find anyone who even knows what they are, much less who has a use for them, but was pleasantly surprised to get quite a few requests. I gave them to a woman who wants to organize her grandparents' decades worth of slides and produce a slide show for her family.

When you get right down to it I don't know why I don't give away my remaining slide trays (I held onto 4) and the projector. I don't use them, and don't really discern any use for them in the forseeable future. It would be good to get these things out there while someone can still use them. But I'm not seriously considering doing this. I don't own my own digital projector, so there could be some farfetched scenario where I still need to give a slideshow on short notice and would need this nice old analog one. Plus I'm sentimentally attached to it, having found it in a New Mexico thrift store for $8 -- a steal, back then, for a professional projector -- and lugged it back to Maryland in the overhead compartment on the airplane. I am justifying its ongoing tenure in my studio based on two criteria: one, I'm a sucker for analog photo technology, and believe the occasional self-indulgence is OK; and two, maybe I can do some sort of arts and crafts thing with it with the boys some day -- making silhouettes or something. At the very least Jack would have a ball playing with it. So it stays. For now.