Restored Photos featured in "Sure to Rise: The Edmonds Story"

Congratulations to Kate, Richard and Peter for successfully completing "Sure to Rise: The Edmonds Story". It was a pleasure for me to contribute to the project by helping Kate with the digitization and restoration of many of the family photos featured in the book. Kate possessed a remarkable collection of captivating early 20th-century photos showcasing her ancestors, which were tucked away in family photo albums. I digitized and revitalized selected images. Below are a handful of before and after examples showing the damage alongside their rejuvenated counterparts ......

Before: Family group photo - original size 24.7cm by 14cm and damage detail. Restoration included removal of scratchs, tear, dust spoting and stains (See damage in enlarged details)

After: Restored Family group featured as a double page spread in the book 25cm by 42cm     

Before: Ladies on the steps showing the original photo which measured 10.8cm by 6.3cm. Restoration included cropping and enlargement; removal of dust, silvering, minor marks and correction of overexposure. Photo Credit: Dianne Gallagher

After: The Ladies on the steps as featured in the final publication 16cm by 13.5cm.

Before: Photo of Thomas Edmonds supplied by others. Restoration involved minor lens correction, removal of damage - spotting dust and fading.

After: the restored portrait featured as a chapter heading in the book. 

Organising those summer snapshots

Source :wikipedia

So you are back from the Christmas holidays with a pile of snaps....

Hopefully you have downloaded them onto your computer and backed them up in the cloud or elsewhere.   And you filed them so you can easily find them?  Maybe you haven't? Are they still sitting on the camera?.

Whoops!.......

Well its the new year, there is no time like the present to get organised!

There are many different ways of organising your digitized images. Our personal collection of digitized images consists of scanned negatives,slides and photos as well as digital photos, videos, and movies plus we have music sound recordings. We chose to place our digital data into folders based on the date they were taken/ recorded, then into sub-folders based on subject. The date folders are named based on the year and month they were taken. Our file folder notations look like this:-

201401

201402

201412

201501

  

2014 indicates the year and the suffix  01, 02 and 03 indicates the month - January, February, March etc.Using a number based system like this means that the files will automatically sort in chronological order.

Within each date folder individual images, recordings and movies are sorted into sub-folders which are given topic or event names based on their subject matter, for example: Johns birthday, Beach trip, Flowers in the garden.

This system allows us to continue to add to it using the same notation. As we scan older images they can slot in at earlier dates....newer images under later dates....

How do you organize your digital images and data?  Share your ideas under comments....

  

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.

Kelburn Normal School Centenary dramatic colour photo transformation

I am busy scanning Kelburn Normal School class photos for the Centenary celebrations to be held in May 2014.  In the 1970s school photographers started offering school photos in black and white and colour. I can see why they did both...they were not sure about the stability of colour photographic processes.....this one is from 1977...

It looked a little red...I was delighted to discover that it responds well to a bit of photoshop magic!

 

 

For information about the reunion go to  http://www.kelburnnormalschool100.com/index.html or the facebook page  at https://www.facebook.com/KelburnNormalSchoolCentenary

Graduation Portrait

I was really honoured when my friend Maureen asked that I take portrait photos of her and her family following her graduation ceremony.  We did a series of group shots with her family and then individual shots, down at a local park.  This one below is one of my favourite's.... taken about halfway through the shoot, when the family had left, the lighting and the location were just magic, and we just relaxed....

and I didn't even need photoshop!   Well just a little.....

Copyright Carterworks NZ

Fascinating detective work by the Independent

The Independent has had a series of articles showing images taken from glass plate negatives that have recently been uncovered in the Somme area.  It is suspected they were taken by a local amature photographer who would have sold the prints from these negatives to subjects to send home to their loved ones.  One set of negatives is particularly interesting as it shows a woman dressed in an NZ uniform, see the story in the following link....

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/wwi-pictures-unearthed-the-mystery-of-the-man-in-the-lemon-squeezer-hat-8735047.html

 

And another about a different image from this time

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/more-wwi-pictures-unearthed-photographs-found-in-the-somme-come-to-light-8737623.html 

 



Restored image

Original image

Postcard images from this era were very popular and like many I have private images that were sent home (England) during this period. This one is of my great grandfather taken in Ypres (Leper) 1917.    It was probably taken by a local photographer and incorporated into a postcard image. 

Copyright Carterworks NZ

Beautiful wedding photos

Often when digitising family collections I do see some amazing photos.  Recently I digitised a rather beautiful set of wedding photos.  Their owner kindly agreed to let me share a few of these beautiful priceless images which she now has captured in a digital form. 

Note these have only been enhanced by conversion to their true black and white.

Copyright Carterworks NZ

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.