Photo Restoration...it's not just about fixing things!
I have just been to a 100th birthday party for my wife's grandmother. She's an amazing woman, full of stories and anecdotes dating back to around the First World War. I had restored and coloured a photo of her for her 99th birthday that was originally taken on her 21st birthday, but I wanted to do something more to mark this landmark age for her 100th.
I eventually put together a souvenir booklet, wrote some background text for it and included a collection of restored photos that spanned her life. I got a number of copies digitally printed and was pleased with the results, given that I wasn't able to invest the time in it that I had wanted to. We handed out copies to all of the guests, some of them took an extra copy to send to relatives who couldn't make it. It went down very well, all in all.
As a result I got talking to someone at the party who had brought some very old photos with her. One of them was of my wife's great grandparents of whom we didn't think any photos existed. Of course I was thrilled with this 'find'. Much less thrilled to see how the photo had been treated...
The photograph had been removed from an album (where it had spent the best part of 100 years safe from harm) and was now residing in a cheap hole-punched plastic wallet, the kind you might find in a stationery shop. The photo was very faded and someone had aparently offered to "fix" it. Except that photo restoration wasn't what this person had in mind. Oh, no. Colur photocopying with some deft adjustment of the brightness controls was what this person had in mind! Needless to say, what was returned was a bigger, darker photocopy of a faded photograph.
Good intentions aside, the photograph ended up suffering more damage in the previous week than in the 100 years before that. Removed from the safely of its album it had curled around on itself to form a tube, and closing the lid of a photocopier on it (to flatten it out again) had caused it to crack down the middle, almost splitting it in two. At least I got the opportunity to do a full digital photo restoration on it before any more damage was done.
There is more to photo restoration than "fixing" old photos. For anyone interested in this activity, learning the right way to handle old photographs goes without saying. But we also have a responsibility to educate others in the treatment of these delecate scraps of paper, so that some of them may last another 100 years, waiting their turn for restoration.
I eventually put together a souvenir booklet, wrote some background text for it and included a collection of restored photos that spanned her life. I got a number of copies digitally printed and was pleased with the results, given that I wasn't able to invest the time in it that I had wanted to. We handed out copies to all of the guests, some of them took an extra copy to send to relatives who couldn't make it. It went down very well, all in all.
As a result I got talking to someone at the party who had brought some very old photos with her. One of them was of my wife's great grandparents of whom we didn't think any photos existed. Of course I was thrilled with this 'find'. Much less thrilled to see how the photo had been treated...
The photograph had been removed from an album (where it had spent the best part of 100 years safe from harm) and was now residing in a cheap hole-punched plastic wallet, the kind you might find in a stationery shop. The photo was very faded and someone had aparently offered to "fix" it. Except that photo restoration wasn't what this person had in mind. Oh, no. Colur photocopying with some deft adjustment of the brightness controls was what this person had in mind! Needless to say, what was returned was a bigger, darker photocopy of a faded photograph.
Good intentions aside, the photograph ended up suffering more damage in the previous week than in the 100 years before that. Removed from the safely of its album it had curled around on itself to form a tube, and closing the lid of a photocopier on it (to flatten it out again) had caused it to crack down the middle, almost splitting it in two. At least I got the opportunity to do a full digital photo restoration on it before any more damage was done.
There is more to photo restoration than "fixing" old photos. For anyone interested in this activity, learning the right way to handle old photographs goes without saying. But we also have a responsibility to educate others in the treatment of these delecate scraps of paper, so that some of them may last another 100 years, waiting their turn for restoration.
posted by Mark Wilson | 1:29 PM
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