How Civil War-Era Tintype Photographs Were Made

I recently discovered this YouTube video showing how early Tintype photos were made. As the site where I originally saw this posted said, it makes you appreciate digital!

Kelburn Normal School Historic photos for a play

Earlier this year I was asked to supply a number of restored historic photos which were used as the backdrop for a school play featuring views of the school's history.  Some of the photos used are shown below:

      The school hallway 1920s

Junior school 1920s

Influenza epidemic

The top playground

Time capsule

Teacher trainees observing class

The junior school in Ngaio Road

  Kelburn School from the Glen



An early NZ Panorama

Some time ago I was asked to restore a very large old image of a Scout gathering in Carisbrook Dunedin taken in 1931. The image is fascinating as it has so much happening in it - there are troops of boys building things, standing, climbing as well as a large audience watching.  If is also interesting as an example of an early panorama taken long before images could be digitally stitched together in Photoshop or by the push of a button in your camera.  The image is for a book by Owen Rogers on the History of Scouting in NZ entitled Adventure Unplugged.   

This proved to be a fun challenge!  Not only did the original image have the usual problems of foxing and fading but it was originally taken as two images and joined together!  (I suspect the original two photos may have been manually cut).  At some stage someone had placed a round object directly onto the photo which proved to be the hardest part to fix as I also needed to bring out details in the background at the same time and get rid of the circle shape.  But I love a challenge.  After numerous layers of work I can say that I am really pleased with the final result, Owen was too.

Copyright Carterworks NZ

Bikie Days

Original photo

Most recently I have been restoring a couple of biking photos taken in Auckland in the 1960s. These photos were scanned and emailed to me and featured an irregular texture that showed up in the scanning process.  After a couple of additional scans I was able to restore the faded colour, back to the original black and white as well as remove the texture. Below is the end result.

Restored photo

Kelburn Normal School Photos scanned

Over the last few weeks I have been scanning a large number old photos from our local school in Kelburn, Wellington dating from the early 1900s through to the pre-digital present. The school will celebrate its centenary in 2014 and over the next wee while I will be restoring those in need of attention. As you can image some of the photos need some restorative work.  I will feature some of the before and after restorations on this site

My website is live

Today I launched my Carterworks website http://www.carterworks.co.nz.

Welcome

Hi

Welcome to my first blog.  Over the last few months I have been busy putting together a new website for Carterworks in betweeen art assignments and actual photographic restoration projects.

My most recent photographic project was to restore a damaged photo of an old Wellington College boy taken in the early 1900s.   His family were able to scan the photo at a high resolution and from this I was able to rebuild one foot which had been lost in the original photo and remove foxing and other signs of time.  I then produced both sepia and black and white copies of the photo at original and A4 size.  The original photo despite its damage still had lots of wonderful detail - you could really see the different textures of the materials - the silk flag, the persian carpet his shiny leather boots.  His family were delighted with the result and the college now holds the restored photo in its archives