A new printing project begins!

Long-time readers and people who know me know how passionate I am about printing. Printing is THE most important part of your photography, but sadly it’s a dying art. I have a new project which involves printing, but not photos that I’ve generally taken. This is the project.

I have many hundreds (possibly thousands) of photos from my parents, grandparents and great grandparents and beyond. Although I’ve scanned many hundreds of these photos, I still have occasional batches that I scan, usually photos that have been lost somewhere and not found with the huge haul at my parents’ house.

My project is to do something a different. All images are of course archived digitally, so they are all safe for the future should something happen. The problem we have is that the old photos come in all shapes and sizes, from very small booth shots, to small square images, long ratio images and large images.

I intend to choose the very cream of the crop images, and clean them up, and make a new 6×4 image and store them in a new album! It’ll be like a more accessible archive of the old images, but re-imagined!

The plan is to crop to the 6×4 ratio and to leave the colours as they are (if they are not faded etc), with tweaks to highlights or shadows and overall boost in exposure if needed.

Where images have been damaged, they can be repaired and there will be a pristine 6×4 version of them image. There photographs are already 6×4, I might simply straighten or crop a bit closer. I’ve already done a few tests over the months, and I’ve been more than happy with the results.

A lot of images from the past are by various family members and of course not properly composed or are not straight. I know this is the charm of film, but these re-imagined images will correct those and they can be viewed “as new” images!

I’m looking forward to this, it’ll be a great collection of easy to access historic photos for the children (and us) to look at any time!