Unusual marks on an old photo

Recently I was asked to restore a photograph that had some unusual fine white pin marks on each corner.   I have not seen these types of marks before....

The full restored photo

Enlarged pin mark

The marks remind me of crop marks used by print designers when laying out publications either to indicate page edges or where to crop an image. I am wondering if these marks were added by the photographer to assist the picture framer. So far my research has not been able to confirm this. Have you seen this on any of your old photos do you know what these marks indicate?

Copyright Carterworks NZ

Kelburn Normal School Centenary digitisation and display project

Visitors to this blog will have noticed it has not been updated recently. As well as client projects, I have been digitising of Kelburn Normal School's photographic collection in time for the school centenary which was held in May this year. The Centenary turned out to be a great event with 300 attending on the first night and many more on the Saturday for official opening, viewing of displays, and entertainment.  On the Sunday some returned to take a more leisurely look at the photos.

Kelburn School has an impressive photo collection ranging from formal class and sport photos, to music and drama, events and happenings over the years, plus images of the school and teachers.  To date Carterworks has scanned over 1300 images and that is only to 1998! (It excludes documents and photo key notes).

Over 30 people sent in photos many using the Carterworks file uploader to load images from around New Zealand, Australia and England....so even those who could not make it on the day could contribute. 

From past experience with reunions I knew that having original photos on display was not a good idea, partly because many of the photos were small and secondly photos are fragile and can get damaged. As all the images had been archived scanned to international standards it was easy to convert and enlarge them on to A4 sheets for display.  Admittedly the schools printer was kept busy for 3 to 4 days!  The prints filled over 40 square metres of display area.  The boards were placed in 6 classrooms around the school for the main open day and in the hall on the Sunday. There were so many images table tops and walls were also used..  

Below are some shots of people enjoying the photo displays on Saturday.

The photos were enjoyed by all ages.

The larger prints allowed people to identify themselves in the photos and this started many discussions....


Photo Boards in the hall on Sunday - which gives some idea of the extent of the collection.

The work continues....
From 1998 onwards the school had class photos on display in the school hallways and stairwells.  Those photos not in a digital format (from the late 1990s to 2008) will be digitised over the coming months to complete the project.....

Copyright Carterworks NZ



An interesting way of displaying your digitized images at a party

Most people know about digital photo frames,but not many people realise a lot of modern TVs can be used in the same way. Recently my dad turned 80. We wanted to do something special for his party. I have been digitizing many of our family photos, slides and negatives.   It was easy to go through the digitized collection and select images to display along with more recent digital photos we had taken to create a personalized digital slide show. It was then a simple matter to load the digital images onto a USB stick and insert it into the USB slot on my parents TV.

The TV's slide-show function automatically displayed each image for 20 seconds.

What surprised me was how much interest this little digital show generated at the party. People enjoyed looking at the images and talking about them.  Many of the images contained family members and friends who were at the party. The TV made a brilliant viewer as everyone could see it easily.  Digitization allowed us to view images from the early 1900s to the present day in one show.

Creating a photo wall

Like most people we had a collection of photograph frames given to us as presents over the years.  After having children  I always had the intention of framing some of our family photos and putting these on the wall...

...I read books on hanging artworks to try and give me inspiration.....but getting all the photos together was an ongoing process...... deciding what to hang and how to make the most of the arrangement of the frames my stairwell just got put in the "too hard basket".....

......it just wasn't happening...



Then recently I saw an article in a Your Home and Garden magazine where the owner of a house had just hung a whole lot of  white frames on her wall...
some had photos in them ...
some were empty....









The designers reasoning was - I have all  these frames  - lets just  arrange them on the wall to look good and I will fill them as an ongoing project.   At last, a solution to my problems! I didn't have to store those old photo frames in a box in the roof anymore - I could just hang them on the wall and over time I would fill them with images of my family.....

Hanging our photo frames proved quite a mission, because over the years we had amassed quite a collection....in fact we had nearly 30 frames....fortunately we have a large hallway!   I laid all the frames out on the floor and arranged them so they looked balanced.  I didn't have one consistent wood colour, or even frame colour ....but my decorating experience has taught me that you can mix different woods together and they will work....and gold and black and silver can complement the wood as well.  Using a straight edge, chalk and a spirit level I hung all of them.  It took me three days

Now I have a work in progress that I add to as I restore and add to my family photographic collection.