Bosserman Family Album

It's been an interesting trip down memory lane as I scanned these pictures in. It's been fun to see Mom & Dad back when they were young, and Bud & Dave back when they were just toddlers. In these pictures, Mom & Dad are younger than I am today.

Something that I hadn't thought about until I started scanning these slides is how much harder photography used to be. Dad had a pretty high end camera for the day (a good Nikon he bought in Japan, I believe). But back in the early 1950s there were no light meters built into the cameras, no automatic exposure settings, no auto-focus, and no ability to review your pictures until days (and possibly weeks) later. You took the picture, and you had no way of knowing if it would come out "good" or be out of focus, or be under exposed, or be over exposed, or have bad framing, or whatever. Only after you got home from your vacation trip, dropped the film off at the photo lab, and got the slides back would you know how your pictures turned out.

In this digital age we can be a lot lazier. The cameras can do everything automatically. You can shoot as many pictures as you want, review them immediately, and delete the bad ones. Dad had no such technology helping him. Consequently, some of these pictures aren't too great. But I have not edited any pictures out. If Dad took 'em, you'll find them here. But sometimes I had to really, REALLY work to get a decent scanned image. And there's nothing I can do about the ones that are out-of-focus!

Fortunately, Dad used Kodachrome. Kodachrome is very possibly the finest color film ever made. It yields the richest colors, and it lasts a very long time without degrading. Wait until you see some of the blue skies and red clothing in these pictures. Some of these pictures are nearly 60 years old, and they still look great.

Sadly, Kodachrome has gone the way of the dinosaurs. The digital age has finally killed it off. There is only one photo lab left in the WORLD which develops Kodachrome (Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas). And during the period I was scanning all these slides in (it took me more than a year!) Kodak stopped selling Kodachrome. They hadn't manufactured it for several years, and they finally announced during 2009 that they would not be making any more. Once existing stocks are gone, there will be no more Kodachrome.

So in some ways this site is an homage to Kodachrome as well as the history of the Bosserman family. Paul Simon said it best back in 1973:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Indeed. Anyways, on with the show.

Box #1, 1951-1954	Box #2, 1954-1956	Box #3, 1956-1966
ANCIENT Photos from Dad's Childhood	Various Scanned Documents