Hunkering down

The winter weather has finally arrived and the temperatures seem to be headed in only one direction: down! This is the perfect time to stay home and learn a new skill or take on a project you've been putting off! Last year, when COVID gave me more free time than anticipated, I pulled out several plastic storage tubs of photographs and organized them by date! It was a wonderful trip down memory lane! The printed photos, in their drug store envelopes, stopped around 2001, when I got my first digital camera. More recent pictures are on a computer hard drive and not so easy to browse. That's the thing about prints, you can touch them and look at them without the aid of a computer. The drug store prints had their downside, including compulsory double prints of all the accidental pictures of the floor and the portraits with the heads cut off! Digital gives us the opportunity to take many more pictures and only print the ones we like, but how many DO we print? Most of you reading this take pictures with a cell phone these days, and the cameras in those cell phones are many times more powerful than my first digital cameras, but how many do you print? There's something powerful in looking at old photographs. They have the ability to take us back through the years. When families get together, the albums come out and we marvel at the way we have changed, how the children have grown and all the loved ones who are no longer with us.

Since restoring old photographs is my jam, I took the faded and discolored photos as a chance to practice and improve my Photoshop skills. Color photos from the 1970s and 80s have often faded more than black and white or sepia images from the early 1900s. It can be a challenge to restore the color and I often have to guess what the original color was but it's so satisfying! In the end, does it really matter whether a dress was pale pink or pale lilac in real life? It's about taking a sad ghost of a picture and bringing it back to life. 

When I photograph my clients, the image I sell them includes both digital and  print. Clients often think that "digitals only" should be cheaper but in fact, the work is the same, whether or not they are printed. The art is in the image, not the print. A professional lab print is a bonus and one which you will display in your home for years to come. No one displays a USB drive on their wall. Pictures are meant to be looked at and prints are the best way to do it. The same goes for the old photos; if you love them, restore them and display them proudly on your wall or in a book. Share them with your children and grandchildren, and pass the stories along to future generations.