Slides and whispers

My daughter Caitlin is applying to many colleges, several of them art schools requiring color slides. Remember those? Little cardboard edged pieces of plastic that one's parents put in a carousel and shined ghosts of summers past onto a wall.

She finished the last painting yesterday. I need them to arrive at the Rhode Island School of Design by Thursday. Two days.

If you, like me, have been so immersed in digital cameras, it is hard to remember how to do these things. I think in flash cards, keychain mini-drives, and printer's ink, which are sold in my drugstore, where do you go for slide film? And where is my old analog camera anyway? Don't those use little round batteries, batteries that have to be dead by now?

I discovered there are specialty photographic services shops that will take a digital image and turn it into a slide for 20 bucks an image for a 1 day turnaround... but my good digital camera still has Yellowstone National Park dust polka-dotting the sensor. I've been meaning to take the Nikon d70 somewhere to get it cleaned.... I wiped the sensor once--it turned out OK--but it was a sweat inducing horror that I don't want to experience again. One wipe too hard and 600 bucks of camera is scratched worthless.

My friend, the talented professional photographer, Lynn Saville, said her slide film had expired and I'd need to buy her new "daylight" film, and I would have done all that, but she had a class to teach and Caitlin couldn't get the film and portfolio to her in time.

Then through Caitlin's highschool (LaGuardia Arts) I got the name of a photographer, Peter Brandt, who snaps slides of art student's portfolios all the time. He has the film, the lights, the lenses, the set-up. He gets it developed. ASAP. Thank gawd. Of course, this costs.

So why was I up at 6:30 am snapping shots of her portfolio just in case? Because you never know. I should be thinking about my reading tonight... Shhhhhhh, just one more spotty shot, bracketed...