Today at Shangri-Laura

Photo Restoration Project: Best Friends, Fading in a Garden Window

A dear friend of mine, who recently turned 80, had had this photo in her garden window for a very long time. She's on the left, and is still in touch with the little girl pictured with her. Let's just say, sunshine and old photos are not a good combination.

She asked me if I could rescue this photo:

Happily, the answer was yes. 

Don't let your precious memories fall prey to the ravages of time. By all means display them but do consider getting them restored and preserved on high quality archival paper before the details fade away.  If you would like me to help, drop me an email (laura @ laurayoungphotography . com).

The Only Surviving Portrait of a Grandfather

A person with one single photo to remember them by. That's tough to wrap one's mind around in this day of Selfies Gone Wild, isn't it?

The gentleman in this portrait is the maternal grandfather of the same client whose father I shared with you earlier. It's a marvelous photo, small (2x3 inches maybe) but very well done back in the 1920's. (Which makes it 90 years old or so.) The restoration was going to be cleanup of the odd scratches and specks with a wee bit of tonal adjustment while prepping it for enlargement.

I've really come to appreciate these photos for the skill of the photographers who had to get it right in the days when film, large equipment and cumbersome processing were required. We've grown so soft in this day of digital photography where we can take countless photos in the blink of an eye and delete them without a penny leaving our pockets. And they can be distributed far and wide with no expense at all (for better or worse).

Back in the day, the portrait was in investment and care was taken that it be treated as the special event it was.  It was an occasion to look one's best for and to treat with respect. After all, it may be the only portrait a person ever has taken.

And that is exactly the case with the dignified and handsome gentleman you see above. This is the only photograph my client has of her grandfather, a man she never met. In fact, her own mother never met him.

As Christy tells his story:

My grandfather was a farmer in southern Indiana, along with his five brothers.   He worked in the coal mines at night and then farmed all day long.  The corn was late coming out the fields in 1927/1928 so he was out harvesting corn by hand in late Dec with his brothers.  He came in and told my grandmother he didn't feel well and was going to lie down.  He took off his boots, laid in the bed and died two weeks later of pneumonia. 

He was just 28 years old. 

My grandmother was three months pregnant with my mom when he died. The night of his death, he told her she would have a girl and that he would like to name her.  Mary Margaret was born in June of that year.  She never met her father, my grandfather.  The only picture she has of him is the one you worked on and restored and a copy of his World War I draft card he signed that I got off Ancestry.com. 

After he passed, my grandmother remarried and left for Tennessee, raising my mother there. My mom met my father there, his family having been in the south since the late 1700's.

And now, for the restoration...

And do know that photo restoration does not have to be prohibitively expensive. Major repairs can be time consuming but for high quality shots that just need some mild damage repair, you may be surprised to find this work well within your reach. Even more challenging projects can be more affordable than you might expect. And when you are looking at a single, fragile remnant of a life long since passed, isn't it worth preserving while you can?

Have a project you would like me to look at? My email is [email protected].

This WWII Photo Restoration Project Has Left Me in Awe

Did you see the prior photo restoration project I posted?  The one where this:

 became this...

Well, first, you should know that I have really awesome and astute friends because without them I just might have missed out on a truly remarkable story.

After I shared the original post on Facebook, one of my friends noted that the Jeep's name was Katie (just beneath the windshield there) and that the paratrooper (the father of the woman who asked me for the restoration)  was wearing the Screaming Eagle shoulder patch of the 101st Airborne. That was the unit that inspired the book and movie, "Band of Brothers."

Christy (the daughter) quickly confirmed and added, "He jumped in behind enemy lines the night before D-day on a suicide mission."

I'm sorry but what did you say???

I will admit that I felt a little like a dufus for not having asked for more of this gentleman's history. I was so focused on the restoration that I literally missed the hero for the trees!

And when I say hero, I mean HERO.

Christy went on to share:

He was in every major battle the 101st airborne had in WWII and is in the famous picture with Eisenhower who met the 101st before they jumped in before D-Day.  The generals calculated the 101st would suffer 90% casualty rate so they flew in steak and ice cream for them before they left.  Kinda like a last meal.  My dad jumped in ahead of the invasion behind German enemy lines to set up beacons for the other paratroopers who were going to be dropped later and to wreak havoc with the Germans.  It was a suicide mission and they told them that so they only took guys who volunteered.  My dad of course volunteered, cause he was that kind of man.  He told me he could see the D-Day ships lined up and out on the ocean coming to the beaches the night before.  He stated he never saw so many ships in his life and he felt sorry for those poor bastards landing on those beaches.

 

From there he want to Carentan, Holland, and then was called up to go to Bastogne.  As the other troops were leaving Bastogne, the 101st was going up. By then that unit was battled hardened, seasoned veterans.   He was in the perimeter of Bastogne, in foxholes repealing the German panzer divisions.  

 

He received his Bronze Star for Bastogne.  He and his buddy allowed panzer tanks to roll over them and expose a the tanks underbelly where the armour wasn't as thick and they would destroy the tanks hitting that spot.  The Americans at that time had no weapons to pierce the German panzer tanks so you had to hit them in a certain spot.  My dad and his buddy knocked out six panzer tanks. He also met Patton when he liberated Bastogne along with the air-force who dropped supplies to them.  Funny, generals and other big shots never impressed my dad.

 

After Bastogne, he fought in the Ardennes Forest which was terrible.  He said it was almost as bad as Bastogne.  He then fought his way to Germany and Berchtesgaden where Hitler's mountain home was.   After that, he was training to be sent to Japan then the war ended, thank goodness. 

 

He never spoke of the war until much later in his life, around his late 70's when we were out in the fields farming together.  It changed my dad forever.  My mom said when he stepped off the train from coming home, she knew he was not the same man she married and that never changed back.  My sister was already 3 years old and had never seen him!   

 

Not all the casualities are left on the battlefields.  My dad never said he or any of the others were heroes, just doing their job.  He said the heroes where the ones who didn't come back.  

Quite a bit to absorb, isn't it? And there is more...flashing forward, Christy added:

 

I was in the army, stationed in Germany where my dad fought years before and my son was born on German soil.   You never know, do you.   My son was very special to my dad and they had a close relationship.  I bet he never thought a grandkid of his would be born on German soil after the war.

I enjoyed doing photo restoration before but this has taken it to a whole new level for me. I'm fascinated, honored, intrigued and feel incredibly privileged to be able to bring these photos back to life. Christy said they brought tears to the eyes of those who received them as gifts this past Christmas. That touched me very much. Prior to my working on them, Christy had the only copies.

 

My friend, Peter, said it so well,

 

"Some of this material wasn't treated well by our parents. Some of our fathers did not think that their WWII experiences were anything extraordinary enough to merit special consideration. Some of them even preferred to not be reminded of times that could be considered the "good old days" only if you weren't there. But for the sake of family history and indeed, for the history of the world, they should be preserved."

I'll show you a restoration I did of Christy's maternal grandfather in a coming post. And yes, he, too, has quite a story.

 

In the meantime, if you would like to see if I can help you preserve some of your photos as well, please don't hesitate to contact me. Email [email protected]

Photo Restoration and Making Something Out of Nothing

My mom gave me a genetic predisposition for intense attention to detail, a trait which comes in handy when you are restoring photographs.  I had a really fun project recently in which I had three photos to restore (I'm working on a 4th now). Starting with the easiest, here are the before and after versions (click for larger view):

First of all, how handsome is the gentleman?

This photo was actually used as a postcard. It was a very beautiful photo and only needed a little touch up to clean some cracks in the finish, some pen press marks that you could see in person (not as evident here) given it was a postcard, and a little crisping and brightening to enlarge it (which it did very nicely on archival quality fine art paper).

In this day of selfies and digital photography you can forget how very special photos used to be. That's why I really enjoy these projects. Even though this wasn't my own Dad,  I treated this project with the same care I would if it had been.

I treat everything I do that way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next up in difficulty was this portrait, which I was happy was already 8x10. It was difficult in that the shades of the background were so bloody close to the shades of the uniform.

I had been hoping to be able to reduce the grainy effect of the original but the very subtle shift in hue from face to uniform to background was just not going to allow it without severely compromising the available facial detail so I popped what I could, cleaned up a few stray scratches and warmed up the tone a bit, chosing a nice bamboo archival quality paper.

 

And then it got really fun...

Here's the original. It was very tiny (I don't even think it was 2x3 inches but I didn't write it down).

The task was to both restore and enlarge it. And as you can see looking up at the upper right corner, that spelled trouble. Who knew I'd spend an afternoon creating ghost trees? Check out the result: I was able to get it to enlarge to a very respectable 5x7. Unfortunately that is all the presenting facial detail would allow, no matter how awesome my ghost trees.

I'll pop up some photos I restored for myself down the road. I've saved my infant aunt from a nasty coffee cup stain, restored faces half torn away, and have been delighted to be able to immerse myself so fully in these moments preserved so proudly from days gone by.

Have a project you'd like me to take a look at? Happy to help if I can! Drop me a line (email in the upper left sidebar or hit me up through any of my FB pages there also).