For decades, boxes and boxes of family slides sat on a cupboard shelf in my Paris apartment. The images span the late 1950s to the late 1990s. Just a few weeks ago I found a very good photo lab in central Paris. They digitize old slides and retouch the colors. Here’s an example: my English mother in our backyard in the early 1960s (in a Toronto suburb.) I thought the technician at the photo lab did a really good job correcting the color: look how my mother’s lipstick nearly matches the red flowers!

When I showed this image to my 16-year old godson, he said – “She looks like Blanche Neige.” (Snow White)

Scanning your old collection of 35mm slides is the perfect way to preserve them and give them a new life as digital images. If I have one piece of advice to give you, it is this: if and when you find a photo lab, make sure they do the work on the premises. If they farm the stuff out to another lab, there’s the risk of your precious memories getting lost en route. That happened to me once.