When They Were Young

Still don't have any new stuff worth showing, and have been doing a good bit of scanning old family photos and working on those.

Trying to scan a bunch at a time and when I can't sit there any more, I stop. Then later I try to pull them up one at a time and repair them. I found a box with a big envelope with a bunch of loose prints in it, and that's mostly what I've been scanning on the flatbed scanner.

I try to scan them as high quality as my scanner will allow, work on these huge .tif files as much as I can in 16-bit mode and then at some point convert them to 8-bit due to limitations in Photoshop Elements, and finish working on them.

I tend to key in on the people in the photos, dust specks and scratches on their faces and bodies, and if something is obvious on the background, I'll do a bit of repair there too, but I don't worry about that as much as the people themselves.

The first photo here is one of my mother when she was 15 years old. It was marked on the back of the photo that it was taken in July of 1950, which makes her having just turned 15. I don't know what the occasion for the dress was, but I got a kick out of this one with her being a bit younger than in most of the photos I have of her. This print was pretty scratched and I worked on it until I got sick of it, which ususally coincides with my back hurting from sitting at the computer a long time, and I stopped and declared it done.

The second photo made me laugh. That's my Dad when he was 18, just before leaving home for the US Navy. That's his little sister, my Aunt Gayle, sitting there next to him. It was taken in August of 1952. They both look pretty mean in the photo, which is what makes me laugh when I look at it. I don't know if they were caught unaware and hadn't smiled or if they were truly upset about something. This one was in much better shape than the one above of my mother. This one was still in a flip book with a cover along with other photos and had been better protected over the years.