Joe McMillan made a very important point when he talked about labelling slides and cataloguing them.
Nicolas Morant, a commercial photographer best known for his photographs of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the Rockies did most of his publicity shoots in several formats. CP would buy the images they wanted. Usually, they chose large format colour and black and white. He also shot 35mm Kodakcromes. CP Corporate Archives owns the images they purchased from him, and he owns the rest. He never labelled his slides. John Garden, who wrote his biography "Nicolas Morant's Canadian Pacific" used the slide collection for the illustrations. Even consulting with Nicolas in person, finding the time, date and location of each slide was very difficult. Sadly, now it would be impossible, as Nicolas Morant suffers from alzhiemers disease. The late CP corporate archivist, Omer Lavalee had a large collection of Kodakcromes shot in the 1950 and 60's of Canadian steam. Although in the keeping of a friend, the collection is in dissaray, and with only very cryptic labelling (the year and month), it will be a monumental task identifying where and when they were taken. The moral of this tale is, label your slides and catalogue them. You never know when you will be out of the picture. Also, make sure you make it known what you want done with your slides when you die. In some cases, relatives feel they are sitting on a gold mine."He made money of it when he was alive", not realizing that considerable effort was expended getting the images published. Other collections have ended up as landfill. Maybe give your collection to someone who will take an intrest in it before you die. Phil Mason (with four generations of Logan slide boxes, grey, gold and blue) --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1736
