Jo@Carterworks

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Instagram and vintage - they're fun but they are not the only option for your old slides & vintage photos

Recently I have noticed lots of fashion shoots with a vintage or instagram look. These are great fun. There are now tons of phone apps and photoshop tutorials that show you how to create these effects – which can look great if chosen well and applied to the right image….

I started to wonder where the idea came from to add these effects...............

I suspect it is a result of home scanning of family photos....

Old colour photos and slides naturally produce this vintage or retro instagram effect because the scanning process just copies the chemical damage caused to the film or print over time. While some images look nice, others just don’t work. A lot of people just don’t know how to fix this …..and think their only option is to throw their photos away!

The good news is you have options. You don’t have to put up with this chemical damage once your images are digitised. Any digitised image can be colour corrected and restored to bring out the true colours of the original image . In this photo taken in the early 1980s, the original is on the left, the restored one is on the right….

You can also get rid of other unwanted effects - dust, scratches, over exposure, shadow, and even people as in this example from my website which was a Kodachrome slide from the 1960s.

If you have some images sitting round home that look like this…

then give me a call ........they can be saved

Alternatively you can send your scanned photos directly to me via my file up-loader!

http://www.carterworks.co.nz/cwphotorestorev3_010.htm

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

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

Sunday, June 16, 2013

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.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Scanning Glass Plate Negatives

Recently I was given a number of glass plate negatives to scan. Their owner thought they dated from the late 1800s but wasn’t too sure what the images were as they were difficult to see. The negatives had been stored away flat in wads of newspaper...

We have a special tray in our scanner that enables us to scan glass plate negatives with the emulsion side uppermost so the delicate emulsion does not need to be in contact with the glass of the scanner - many other scanners cannot do this.

Can you imagine my excitment, these images had not been seen for many years! ....What would we uncover? Below are a couple of images from the collection....

Click to enlarge

Glass plate negatives require careful handling and storing to avoid damage. To protect these negatives it is best that they are stored vertically on their longest side and in individual archival envelopes. For more advice see http://natlib.govt.nz/collections/caring-for-your-collections/photographs

Monday, June 3, 2013

Hidden information - Neville's Discovery

Some time ago I was asked to restore a small photo of Neville's father who was a scout in the early 1900s in Wellington. The photo was quite small and faded and was taken in Hay Street, Oriental Bay.

I restored the photo and printed it at a larger size. I was able to enlarge this photo because the original image was quite sharp and I can scan and print photos at a high resolution. The resulting print showed a lot of the detail not obvious in the original.

After looking at the print, Neville was surprised to notice an officer's ranking shoulder of his father's uniform. He said he never realised his father had obtained that rank as it was not obvious in the original photo.

Copyright Carterworks NZ

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Early colour photography

Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii

One of the most amazing collections of early colour photographs is held by the Library of Congress, known as the Sergey Prokudin -Gorskii collection. These early colour photos were not easily viewable because the images were made up of three separate black and white glass plates which had been shot simultaneously with three separate lenses covered with a different coloured filter- red, green and blue. The colour image was formed when the plates were combined in a specialist viewer. It is believed Gorskii's camera was similar to one developed by Miethe in 1903. Between 1909 and 1915 Gorskii travelled around Russia documenting the country at the time producing both colour and sepia images. He managed to leave the country with around half of his collection that was later bought by the Library of Congress.

In 2000 the Library started scanning these images and many have now been restored, using the process of digichromatography. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html

One of the striking things about these images is the fact they are so real, yet they document a time that we most commonly see in black and white or sepia.