My Nana and Grampa, just married
Jack Bielan is an amazing combination. He is a talented musician, a skilled technician, a happy family man, and a spiritual person who is devoted to the concept of vocation as service.
In other words, he’s a really nice guy.
After a long career in music management, Bielan sold that business and looked around for something else he could do professionally that would “be of service to people.” And what he came up with is Home Archive Services.
He comes to your house and carefully scans your old printed photos to create digital copies, using high quality scanners. He brings all of his own equipment and can scan up to 400 photos in an hour. When he’s finished, he hands you a USB drive or a DVD and leaves. Done. OR, he’ll stay and show you how to create a photo book using an online printing service, or he’ll upload everything to Flickr or Picasa so you can easily share the photos with friends and family worldwide, or he’ll load it all on to a digital frame and add music, too.
Baby Agoura Hills Mom, formerly known as West Haven Kid
What he loves the most about this work, Bielan says, is the way that transferring photos to digital can bring families together.
An Agoura Hills native, Bielan will travel to your house here or all over the Conejo Valley and the LA basin. You fill out a contract with him that protects your photos and your home, and he agrees to come for a minimum of 2 hours for $85 per hour. He takes care of everything…except choosing the photos.
Only 11 years ago – none of this was digital, all film
Bielan came to my house recently so I could try his service. In preparation, I pulled out some oddly sized vintage photos, some proofs from our wedding, and other assorted memories. Warning: this will send you down memory lane and make you want to call the loved ones with whom you haven’t spoken in a long time! Or, it will make you share hilarious and embarrassing photos of your friends with their big 80’s hair on Facebook…
My buddy Lee on the left. It’s a Polaroid!
He arrived on time, set up everything – even his own table! – without a hitch. All he needed was enough space and light and a power outlet. He scanned almost all the photos I set aside for him in the short time he was here, and I truly enjoyed hearing his stories about how his service lights up the lives of older people, especially. It’s the personal attention to his service that really sets him apart, not just the house call, which is rare enough! I appreciated that I didn’t have to send my precious photos away to be scanned. I did recently do that with 1,000 other photos and it took over 2 weeks – I started to get nervous at the end there. I mean, what if any of them had been lost? There’s no way to get those memories back. With Home Archive Services, nothing leaves your house, and at the end you have a digital copy so that if the photos do get damaged or lost, you at least have a backup.
My Gramma and Grampa
A few years ago I had all of my husband’s old home movies from his childhood transferred to DVD and sent copies to his mother and brother as Christmas gifts. Now I can send old family photos to my own family members via email. What a wonderful and meaningful gift this will be.
Now through December 24, Home Archive Services is offering a special: get three hours for the price of two! That’s a lot of photos you can get scanned. It’s easy to set up an appointment and the travel time and equipment set-up and break-down time are not included in your three hours.
See this post for some great shots of Home Archive Services in action, scanning the photos of Sarah Auerswald of MomsLA.com.
I received two hours of complimentary service to facilitate this feature.
