familyalbumarchiving.com

Here’s the story on this picture. I hadn’t seen it in years. Once I scanned it, I saw 2 things: first, that I would never get it to look “new”, because of irreversible damage; second, that this picture captured an essence of childhood that could be seen by everyone, if I handled it right. So I did a number of treatments, eventually ending up with an image which now possesses a dreamy, evocative quality designed to remind viewers of barely remembered stories from their own lives. I started with an OK image, valuable only for its part in my past, & ended up with a piece that will hold its own mingled among ancestors & artwork.

Look around your collection. There are some images you have that just speak to you. These pictures are strong. They come together in content & composition in some indefinable way that goes beyond a normal snapshot. The dreamy treatment I did here is only one of many. Colors can be intensified or faded selectively, objects can be made to glow, B&W images can be colored, & color images can be turned to a stark or soft monochrome.

Enhancements services start at $40 per image, & prints are available. Feel free to contact me with questions about possible effects, or any other questions you may have.

Want help assembling your photos into a book? I’m happy to help. Contact me for an estimate. 

I’ve found that many people get stuck when they think of how they can organize their images. You’re sitting there with boxes, albums, negatives, & the 4000 pictures you’ve taken since you got your digital camera.

What can you do with all these pictures? How can you possibly arrange them so you can lay hands on them easily & show them off to dinner guests? What’s the best way to get copies to your relatives & show off along the way? Well, print a book, I tell you.

Benefits of photo books:

Effortless Viewing!

It’s an easy 2 step process: pick up book, focus eyeballs. Hey folks, I’ll let you in on something. You preserve your photos on CDs, you enjoy them in print form. And while it’s possible to view your entire photo collection on an Ipod’s tiny screen, bear in mind that this is a case in which the cool factor of an experience does not always equal its pleasure. It’s satisfyingly easy to show off pictures to dinner guests when your biggest effort is walking to the bookshelf. Sure beats waiting on the computer.

Custom books for special occasions.

For a sibling’s birthday, you could do a “this is your life” book, starting with classic shots of a dimply, nude baby, continuing on to summer camp & school days, finishing with highlights from previous adult birthday parties. For an anniversary, collect shots of both people as kids, some nice, geeky high school pix, the wedding, offspring & pets they’ve had together. Family history – collect all the really old photos, restored tintypes, old b&w’s, shots of the great-grandparents. Add some text with family stories. Excellent gift for the nieces & nephews as they grow up & move away. New Baby – highlights of the little hominid’s first year, guaranteed to get you in good with the grandparents.

Tame your digital photo files & get them out where you can see them.

You got a lovely, new digital camera, & now your photo files are moving inexorably over your hard drive like kudzu on a hillbilly’s outhouse. You gazed with fond eyes at your pictures when you downloaded them, & have not viewed since. Don’t you want to see those pictures again? Ok then. When you get back from some venture, pick the best photos & make them into a book. “Summer vacation 2008,” “Winter around the house, 2007,” etc.

Where can you get your book made?

Check out blurb.com. They have bookmaking software you download. Use it build your book, then upload your file to place your order. Cost is reasonable. A 7×7″ book with 40 pages can be had for $12 & change. That’s about the price of developing one roll of film. And if you are too pressed for time to fool with the software, or you just would rather not spend that much time on the computer, I can assist you in assembling your book, with rates depending on time. Either way, once you place your order, you’ll get your book in about a week. And your file stays live on their site, which mean you can order more, you can tell relatives &  friends to go there to order copies, & you can even post your book in the public bookstore. (You can make any book you want on blurb, so many customers make fine art books, cookbooks, children’s books, etc.)

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE. The box is on the lower right side of your screen. For you, it’ll be the same. For me, much easier to manage than the email lists I’ve been doing. Thanks – Susan

A reminder that I do provide photo enhancement series for digital photos at $3 per. I can help you salvage shots with poor exposure or weird lighting. Other effects are available, with cost depending on work involved. Let me know the effect you’re looking for & I’ll help you out. Also I can stitch photos together for great panoramas. Contact me with questions.

Hey, decent weather is finally here! At last! The feel of vacation is in the air, trips are being planned, tents are being excavated from the shed & dusted off. If you take plenty of pictures, you’ll be happy to relive these golden days in the grim, gray days of winter. That’s easy to say, but I know technology has moved pretty fast, & a lot of people have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with their cameras. So I’ve written down some ideas & methods that’ll help you really get some good use out of that little digital camera you paid so much for.

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Take LOTS of pictures! Lots & lots!

Dig it – you are not shooting film anymore! No longer do you have to mentally ration out multiples of 24 for the duration of your trip. Just shoot. You’ve got your camera, at this point it costs you nothing to take pictures! What a thought. And the more pictures you take, the more good pictures you’ll end up with. You have to get out of the ’saving film’ mindset. Once you have the camera & the SD cards, shooting 500 pictures costs you no more than shooting 50. SD cards are now cheaper than some of the finer brands of gourmet dirt. Get 3 or 4 in the 1-2 gigabyte size. You can easily put at least 300 pictures on one 1 GB card. Larger cards are more likely to be unstable. And when a card crashes, it’s generally done. So it can be a safer bet to get a few cards & then if one goes down, you lose only those pictures, & you can just put in a new card.

Keep your camera with you.

Some of the best shots are of the most fleeting moments in daily life, & the only way you can get those shots is to have your camera close enough to grab when you see the moment developing. Today’s digital cameras are tiny, designed so you can store them in your pocket, then extract them without the use of a shoehorn. Don’t wait for “the trip,” get your camera out & use it every day. You’ll look back in a few months & be so pleased at the glimpses of daily life, & casual shots you used to miss when you carried a larger – & more expensive to use – film camera.

Protect your work – Lock that card!

Go look at your SD card. It has a little, tiny plastic tab on side. That is a lock. Learn to use it. When you are out & about & get the ‘card full’ message, take out the card & before putting it in its case, move that tab down. This means you can read the card in your computer but you cannot erase it. This’ll keep your pictures safe until you get home & download them, & anyone who unknowingly puts a locked card in the camera won’t be able to erase & format it.

Dump the crap, or how to seem like a great photographer thru merciliess sorting.

I’ve had more than my fair share of complements on my photos. People tell me they love my work, & I should sell them. I appreciate the kind words. I’ll tell you something now about how our minds process information – if I take 5 superb pictures & 5 pathetic ones & show someone all 10, they will be moderately impressed. If I only show them the 5 lovelies, they think I’m Ansel Adams’ illegitimate granddaughter. Why is that? Half my pictures were mediocre, right? I still had 5 good ones, didn’t I? The secret is I only show people the good pictures. Professional photographers shoot hundreds of pictures. It’s partly skill & partly percentages. If 20% of your photos are great, then the more you take, the more great photos you’ll have. Remember – photographic skill is more than what you do with the camera, it’s what you do for every part of the process up to the point you show your work.

So when you download your photos, RIGHT THEN, dump the junk. Don’t sort on your camera, the screen isn’t big enough to let you see focus, etc. But when you download, do a quick run thru & be strong. Get rid of things. If you’ve taken plenty of pictures, you probably have other shots of the same subject that will please you more.

SD cards should be faithful to their machines.

SD cards are handy in that they now fit many devices. Each device puts bits of info on the card it’s using. Devices can become confused if they see notes from some other system. If you take an SD card from some other device, even another camera, you’ll need to format it, otherwise you may well find out that your camera will spot the adulterer, & will slam the front door half way thru your shootfest, leaving you cruising your techno friends in the hopes that one of them can salvage your photos.

External hard drives for your photos

If there is one drawback to digital photography, it’s that it’s SO easy to take a lot of pictures. Even with harsh choices, you will end up with a lot of files, files that expand like sourdough starter all over your system. I suggest you get an external hard drive for your computer & keep all your photo files there. I recommend lacie.com, out of Oregon. They sell a good & reliable product. Even better, they sell refurbs. Their stock changes so if you don’t see the one you want in the refurb section, check back later. All my drives come from them & I am always satisfied.

Batteries

To make shooting lots of pix even more additive, rechargeable batteries have finally become worthwhile! I got these batteries called enloop (click HERE for amazon page) & I also got the LaCross charger listed further down the page. And I am IMpressed! I can put 4 AAs in my big digital SLR & shoot for a week WITH flash, & still not have to replace the batteries. We have a kid household here, & so I bought several AAs & AAAs. It’s great. I haven’t bought batteries since Christmas.

Fun things to do with that camera.

Surreptitious shots.

Now that you’ve gotten permission to shoot like a lunatic, let’s start thinking of some interesting things…I have become fond of the ’shoot from the hip’ technique. It’s so easy with small, autofocus camera. When you’re out & about, turn on your camera & hold it in your hand, lens pointed out, at your side, as if you’re just carrying it. Keep your finger on the shutter button. As you walk, take pictures. You can get some really interesting angles, & lots of candid shots. There is a setting on your camera that will turn off the sounds. (Ahem) This technique is useful for museums & other ‘no photo’ venues. Just make sure you turn the flash OFF. A recent issue of National Geographic had a story on China. The reporter wrote that the Chinese officials won’t let anyone come in with a ‘professional’ camera. He took most of his shots via the hip method, with a compact camera, & they were very good.

Give the kid the camera.

My son loves taking pictures. Sometimes I’ll give him the camera & let him go at it. As stated in earlier, it’s free, so why not? He is young, so I do follow him around, ready to lunge forward & catch the camera. Kids take some really interesting pictures! It’s great to see what he finds photo worthy. Stick in those rechargeable batteries & let them go. You’ll be so surprised & pleased. It’s wonderful.

Picture a day, etc.

Take a picture a day. Choose mundane moments. These are the ones that are most easily forgotten, yet are the sweetest in the moment. After a month or a year, think of the visual diary you’ll have. This is a common project & many people have picture a day diaries online.

Do the thing from Smoke & take a picture every day from the same spot. If you do it of your garden, you could make a slide show & watch the garden grow in fast motion.

Take a picture of your child every week in the same place. Look back in time at the way they’ve grown & changed.

Sign up with smugmug, which I use, or flickr, or any other online site. Upload the photos you like & share them with others.

In closing – digital cameras have made photography inexpensive & easy. Get your camera out & use this fine little toy to enhance your life, have fun, & share with those you care about.

Folks – I’ve got a new service. I now offer enhancement for all those pictures you’re taking with your snappy, new digital camera.

Enhancement start at $5 per image. Please email me if you have questions. If you want to email me an image & have me advise you on how fixable it is, go right ahead. I can help you take the best images in your digital collection & make them truly shine.

Let me show you some examples.

We had some rare snow & I ran out & took some pictures of Reid playing in it. Result? A dark picture, underexposed because of all the whiteness of the snow. If I couldn’t fix this, I would be inclined to delete it. Sure, it’s my son, & it’s snow, but it’s so dark! Some changes in photoshop pulled out the whites, brightened & sharpened the whole image. Now I’m pleased enough with it to keep it.

I liked the gray tones on this shot so I converted it to b&w. Turning a color picture from a digital camera into a b&w pictures is so satisfying! You can lighten or darken colors individually. In this case, Reid’s pullover is blue. I decided to make it a dark gray, but I could have made it nearly white. We have become accustomed to taking all our pictures with color, but a well done b&w photograph is a beautiful thing, & looks great framed.

This shot was taken at dusk in fluorescent light. I brightened it up, corrected the color cast, sharpened it, made a few other changes. It’s much more pleasant to look at now.

I took this shot of some weird ice cream burrito in rural Taiwan, where it’s a local specialty. I remember the day was bright but cloudy, & the vendor was under an awning. As shot it’s sharp enough, but lacking in white tones. I brightened it & worked on the colors some to create a pictures I won’t mind using to describe this fun food experience.

This shot of Reid going crazy with the canned whip cream at a potluck is not great art, but it IS a great illustration of problems common to flash pictures. The background is heavily dark, the whites & blacks are out of balance, & the colors are too cold or warm. I brightened it & fixed the colors, among other things. You can see the improvement in skin tone & in the yellow of the bowl, & the brighter white of the whipped cream. Also the background has been opened up just a bit.

Not very long ago, someone I know moved. He got everything moved in; boxes everywhere, & he gladly stacked rather a lot of them down in the basement, as it was a very good place to store things out of the way while he was settling in. The house conveniently had a washer & dryer in the basement, & after he’d been there a couple of days, he ran a load of laundry. The washer worked fine, but when the water drained out, the drain in the floor got backed up, & the floor all around the washer became wet. And, as you have no doubt already guessed, so did the bottoms of several cardboard boxes. It was a small flood as these things go, nothing that one sloshes thru in galoshes, just some water on the floor.

One of the boxes which happened to be on the bottom of the stack was filled with his photos. And not just his photos, but with every photo his parents possessed. You see, his mother had died shortly before & he had brought her entire collection of photos home with him, & just hadn’t gotten around to sorting them yet. He was extremely fortunate in discovering the blocked drain quickly. He was able to separate his photos & hang them all around the house to dry. If those photos had sat overnight in the wet box, they probably all would have been utterly destroyed. The paper backing would have become goo & the photo emulsion would have melted. He would have lost everything – his own baby pictures, with his parents looking so impossibly young & skinny; the pictures of his grandparents; the never before seen pictures of his great aunts & uncles. What a terrible loss that would have been.

I of course do photo restoration as a way to make a living, but the reason I chose this work is because I feel so strongly that everyone in a family should have as much of their history as possible. I constantly see people wrap themselves in an emotional security blanket about their photos, beccaues they are tucked silent in some drawer or box. They don’t see any danger, therefore there must be none.

Sometimes, loss comes quietly. Sometimes there is no drama. There is no fire that leaves you with a burned out husk of a house; there is no flood that forces you to move out; there is no roof caved in from a tree falling on it during a storm. There is just you, sitting shocked & wordless as you look at the nest of shreds some attic rat has made in your photo box; there is silence as, for the first time in years, you open the box from the basement & gasp at the mold covering everything. Photos can be lost in quiet tragedy.

We can do amazing things, we can click a small machine at something we see, & then transfer that to someone else. It’s the wordless version of writing. Take care of your pictures.

Yes, yes, everyone loves the idea of scanning their photos. They can protect them, have them beautifully restored, make sparkling new prints, share them with relatives…what’s not to like? But the truth is that no one ever acts as if it’s really urgent. After all, the photos have been safely in a box in the attic for the past 12 years, or in your mom’s closet since you were a kid, & they are still there, always there. You go to visit & there they are, living in that timeless & unchanging world of childhood relics, so carefully maintained by your elders. And your own photos…they are in the attic now. They used to be in the closet, but then you moved. You rarely look at them & sometimes you kind of forget exactly where they are, but when you’re sorting upstairs, pushing boxes around, you run across them. You pause in your tasks & sit for a moment, flipping thru the memories. You feel so nostalgic & secure. Some things are for always.

Well, right here is where I want to snap you up by your shorts & give you a good shake. Your photos will never last. And the oldest ones are in the most danger, unless you act to save them. It’s easy to feel complacent about photos because we’ve all grown up with them. But the incredible discovery that allows us humans to pass on exact pictures of what we see, an accomplishment just about on a par with the discovery of writing, has actually been in common use for just over a century, & is too much of a gift to take for granted.

What is the lifespan of your photos?

Color photographs, ideally stored, can last about 50 years. B&W photos can last longer. (The dyes in color photos are less stable.) Let’s just unpack that a bit. Probably one in 1000 people is enough of a geek to store their photos ideally. Actually that’s probably optimistic. I’m sure it’s more like 1 in 5000. So right there, that takes most of us out of the top tier. That time estimate is based on pictures printed on special archival paper – paper formulated to be as chemically agreeable to the photo dyes as current technology can make it. The really special pictures in most collections are the very old ones, & I can tell you they did not have archival paper in the 1800’s, or the 30’s, or the 70’s, even. (Polaroids are a nightmare!)

Storage climate

The ideal: a climate controlled safe with low humidity, below 50%, & stable temperatures.

The reality: Even your driest closet will feel the effects of humid summer days. Uninsulated attics can, in the summer sun, have air temps over 100. Many older basements are extremely humid, & provide the ideal climate for all sorts of mold, which by the way loves to eat the organic dyes on color photos.

Storage specifics

The ideal: photos displayed in albums with acid-free, archival paper & cover, held in with no sort of glue, only acid-free photo corners; slides & negatives in sleeves of the same attributes. Any delicate old photos contained in folders.

The reality: most people got their photos back from the processor in a cardboard envelope, often with the negatives simply loose in the front. They tossed them in a box, & stashed them away. The oldest of your family photos may be in an old album you’ve gotten your hands on. Many of the pictures, the oldest & rarest of your collection, may be glued directly onto decaying paper pages with ancient & unknown glue. Sometimes one sees photos with stains on front, from the glue soaking thru. The quality of the album was whatever was at hand for purchase at the time. Very old loose photos may have been added to the stack at some time in the past, & now they rub against other photos, scratching the delicate surface & further fraying the brittle paper.

Two things you can do to extent the life of your images

1 – Store properly.

• Put your photos in the most regulated area of the house. A main floor is probably better than an attic or basement.
• Seal photos off from the air by putting them in plastic storage boxes with the lids that snap down. Toss in some of those packs of desiccants to absorb moisture. Make a note on your calendar to replace them every few months.
• If you have any very old photos which are just loose, pull them out & put each on in an envelope, then into the plastic box. Store tintypes wrapped so they won’t get scratched.
• Put all photos away from the light. Light is death to your photos.
• Pull albums off shelves, where their edges are decaying due to the dust & light in the room, & seal them in plastic boxes, away in the dark.
• Examine your albums & see if the photos have uniformly shifted color. (I saw this recently on an album of color snapshots from the 50’s.) If so, that’s an indication that the album has made things worse for your photos, sandwiching photos in bad chemicals & hastening damage, all while you thought they were safe in a drawer. Consider taking the time to transfer the contents to a new archival album to halt further decay.

2 – Have your most treasured images scanned & have the damaged ones restored at the same time.

• Your originals will continue to fade, even with the best care. Capturing every bit of remaining information will, for your purposes, freeze time.
• If you want to hang photos on the wall, have good prints made from high quality scans. That way, you can put the framed picture where you like, even on a sunny wall. When it fades, just print another.
• Have a book printed & keep that on the shelf instead of the original album. The benefits are twofold: the album is not handled, & the original pictures are not touched & smeared as people point to them.

I just came across this site…fotoflot.com. Actually it has the long o symbol (say “photofloat”) but I don’t think I can type that in a blog.

This process looks nice, very nice. Fotoflot offers an alternative to traditional glass frames. They print your image on paper, then bond that to a piece of acrylic. I’ve seen this kind of setup, all the cutting & beveling is computer guided so it’s seamless & perfect.

The main advantage is that since there’s no glass, there’s no glare whatsoever. The picture will look fine to anyone standing at any reasonable viewing angle. Also, that effect of the image floating just off the wall is pretty slick, & looks so polished.

Fotoflot also has a nice mounting system, in which you put part of the bracket on the wall, then attach the photo via magnets. This makes it very easy to change pictures, variety being the nice thing that it is. (Oh, you’ll need to order more pix from them, in that case.) And those magnets eliminate any leveling issues. Put the bracket on the wall straight, & forever after, just click in your photo.

My only question is, how do you clean it? I mean, can I Windex that baby? You know it’ll collect dust, & one mounted in a kitchen could get greasy. Glass, you can clean. I cannot find the info on this.

Prices are beefy, but then again I imagine they compare with getting a frame shop to run your photo up in something nice. After all, you’re paying not just for the print, but for the entire mounting system. Prices range from $45 to $185, & that doesn’t include shipping. I will say, tho, that they offer a dazzling selection of print ratios; you can do everything from squares, to long & skinnies, suitable for panoramas.

If anyone tries this, do let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear.

A new year…if you haven’t gotten your 2008 calender yet (who has?!) put it on your list now, & read on for some ideas on how to make it pleasing & interesting.

Just about every house has a wall calendar. Like a lot of people I keep all my appts on my computer, but for the family, it’s just easy to glance at the calendar above the phone to get oriented. I myself have wearied somewhat of nature shots that let me count the hairs on a wild goat’s nose, & I see enough of Sponge Bob on the mac & cheese boxes my son begs for. It’s much better to put what you want on your calendar. Why not, right? You’re the one who glances up at it 14 times a day. Why not look at something fun? Or sweet? Or nostalgic?

I may be biased but I think old photos are ideal for calendars. Why? Because in today’s internet world, it doesn’t make sense to put up recent pictures. There’s no point in giving your parents a calendar with pictures of your baby. It’s not like that’s their only reminder until the pony express blows thru. You can take digital pictures, download them, & have them emailed out in 10 minutes. How everyone looked 6 months ago is old news. The more recent a photo is, the more easily it becomes dated. And the converse is true – the older a photo is, the closer it is to being timeless.

You want baby pictures on your calendar? Fine, use your own. And/or your partner’s. Or siblings’. Want the vacation trip remembered? Great, but let’s put some zing in it, why don’t you? Instead of 12 pictures of the trip you took only last summer, use the pix from that epic road trip you & the family took when you were 9. Now that’s good calendar.

How to get that calender

Make it yourself!

I heartily recommend this. We are, like many families, trying to buy less stuff. Junk. Whatever you want to call it. And the whole mom gig really brings home to me the importance of this principle. Making a calendar is a fine, fine thing to do with the kids. It involves counting, reading, & writing, & they can definitely have fun expanding on the decorating possibilities, lining the edges of the calendar with stickers & drawings.

We have rolls of giant sheets of paper we got at a salvage store. I get my son to help draw the lines on the calendar & write the days & the numbers. We echo the normal wall calendar format & put the calender on the bottom, leaving the top of the sheet blank. Then we select a good photo, or maybe a scan of a wonderful, vintage ad, print it out, & mount it on the top half of the sheet, using photo corners.

For this kind of printing, I have no complaints about my local Fred Meyer store. I email images from my computer & pick them up the next time I’m in. The quality is fine, especially for what is essentially a disposable use, & the price is very low. You can also try your local drugstore chain. Or go online to Kodak.com & do a search for the nearest photo machine. More & more places are setting up the pages online that will allow you to email in your photos, thus eliminating waiting for prints. You certainly can still order the prints in person, if you don’t mind the time needed. Most such machines take CDs, some camera cards, & USB keys. You go thru a fairly simple menu, order your photos, shop a bit, then pick up the prints.

Order it online.

You can easily order a calendar from an online service. The benefits are that it looks really, really good. Slick paper, nice fonts…hey, it’s professionally printed. There could well be times when you prefer the more polished look of a printed calendar. Also, you can get them made in quantity, which is helpful when you want to give, say, 9 calenders to 9 different members of your chosen group. Such cases might overwhelm your handmade production line. There are many services; I recommend photoworks.com (click back there.) I find their products lovely but pricey, or read that as pricey but lovely, depending on how you want to feel about it when you come to the end of the phrase. 11×8 calendars can be had for about $20, & usefully large wall calendars are a rather steep $40, which I guess is only $3.30/month, so maybe I’m just being a tightwad.