Category: Photography

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Diving Headlong into the Past

One of the guys I follow on Instagram posts nothing but what look to be scans of old found photos; the kind you run across in antique shops. I also spend way too much time visiting the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive. I love these voyeuristic glimpses into the past, especially the ones that record the most mundane of daily activities. While looking at scenes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I often catch myself thinking, “Wow. That looks like something that I’d see in my family’s photo albums.”

When my mom and dad divorced in the 80s, they split up the family albums. There were lots of duplicates in my grandmother’s collection that they threw into the mix to help ensure the split was mostly equitable, but not everything is in both sets of albums, and it has been my long term goal to get everything scanned and put back into a single unified virtual album that both my sister and I can have.

After Mom’s passing, I started that project, but was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos involved in her collection I gave up and returned all the physical media to my sister.

About a year before Ben and I left Phoenix, I got the urge to revisit this project and made off with my dad’s albums (with his permission, of course), intending to scan and return them within a couple months.

Like so many of these well-intentioned projects, life intervened and even this modest beginning was put on the back burner. Oh hell…it was shelved and pretty much forgotten about until Dad’s passing a month ago when my sister started cleaning out his place and asked if I had them.

So a couple weeks ago I jumped back into it, and unlike times past, I have not given up. I’m nearly finished with Dad’s albums and will swap them for Mom’s when I see my sister in October. What struck me the most about all this is how so many of these photos really could easily appear on Retronaut or show up in that found-photos Instagram feed:

Mom, me, and our next door neighbor “Gammy” Johnson, 1960

I’m also surprised at how well Photoshop is able to bring so many of these faded shots back to life. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s amazing. The original prints have been faded for so long that it’s how they’re burned into my memory, so in many cases it’s like I’m seeing them for the very first time.

One of the saddest things about looking over all these photos is the realization that since neither my sister or I have children to inherit them, it’s quite likely that all them will one day end up in an antique shop as mere curiosities of a time long gone.

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Fabulous!

Sebastian Kim shot this Spring/Summer 2013 Jean Paul Gaultier ad starring models Ginta Lapina, Hannelore Knuts, Jeneil Williams, Maria Kashleva as Madonna, Grace Jones, Boy George, and David Bowie.

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Awesome!

I’ve reached that age where I now look in the mirror and wonder where the old fart that’s staring back at me came from and how the hell he got into the apartment, so I can definitely relate to this wonderful series of photos from photographer Tom Hussey:

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Happy Halloween!

My friend Jay has been collecting these and posting them to his Facebook account all week. I’d can’t provide a proper attribution link, but I can thank him for letting me steal them.

 

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But is it Art?

You know what’s depressing? Discovering a 99-cent piece of software that applies an effect to photographs that I’ve spent the last two decades of my life perfecting with paint and brush on canvas.

A friend of mine remarked that the finished products are similar, but lack the life and sparkle of my paintings. Agreed. But still…

I guess I should really consider it a blessing in disguise; I can apply the effect to the photograph I want to work from before I start painting and then use that as a guide as to where to make the tone differentiations in the painting (the hardest part of my whole process).

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First Major Snow of the Season

The roads were actually pretty clear, so I probably could’ve driven to work today, but I knew I had to make a dry run at some point to see how long it actually took me to get to work on public transit from our new place.

Surprisingly it takes about the same length of time as from the old place. The difference is I have a very nice half mile walk to the train station instead of having to deal with a bus transfer.

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Disappearing Act

I’ve always been impressed by the pros who can make items disappear from photos.  I know this can be done in Photoshop, but as I understand it’s a pain in the ass and very time consuming for us amateurs.

That’s why when I heard of a program called Snapheal I was intrigued.

I must say, it does a decent job of doing what it advertises:

This is one of the photos I took for May’s 12 on 12 that didn’t make the final cut. It took only a few minutes for me to make the sign and the skateboarder in the background disappear. Yeah, there are some obvious areas where adjacent areas were cloned to fill in where the sign was cut, but that’s only because I used a pretty large brush. If the areas themselves are smaller, or you’re willing to take more time to use a smaller brush multiple times, the program really does do an excellent job of removing unwanted items from your pictures.

In any case, it’s super easy to use.

If you have a Mac and have a lot of photos that need doctoring, this might be for you. (It also includes the normal suite of tools for retouching/adjusting image quality and removing dust and scratches.)

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