Random Tuesday

My photo editing class is on hiatus for a week because the teacher is sick (ugh, winter! everyone is getting sick) so she gave us a bonus class to apologize. Isn’t that great?! It’s a self paced class showing how to restore old photos. I wouldn’t have signed up for it, but it seems like it will be quite useful. I can access it any time I like, which is quite a common selling point for these online classes.

I’ve only taken a quick look at it but there’s a lesson on fixing the color shifts that have affected so many photos taken in the 1970s. It looks pretty simple, changing the color channels individually to adjust for the off colors. Of course it might not work so well on every photo. I have 2 pictures I’d like to work on – they show my in laws on their wedding day, and they’re very pink and faded. I took them to a photo store but the results were less than stellar. So I tried my own amateur adjustments. I thought my black and white versions were not too bad, but I can’t wait to see what I can do with some real skills and tools!

These are not my in laws! This is me and my little brother in the late 70s:

My parents have albums full of pink-tinted photos, some better than the one above, some worse. They’re still lovely photos, but it would be nice to scan and correct them and reprint them. Especially if the color shifts are a sign of chemical breakdowns in the photo emulsion – they will probably only get worse over time.

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My Project Life is coming along. I made a new page on Sunday before we went to my mother in law’s to watch the Superbowl. It was much quicker this week. I have a small pad of paper that I sketch a very basic plan on and then I list all the events and/or photos I think I might want to cover. I checked off what I had photos ready for – I had already done some quick editing and design earlier in the week – and decided what to include as a photo and what to mention in a week review card. I spent a little more time getting the photos ready to print and then did some quick decorative details and captions and the week is almost done. I just have a couple more bits to finish off. There were a couple of details that didn’t look quite as nice as I had imagined they would, but as I look at other people’s pages I see little details that might bother them that fade into the background when you look at the page as a whole. And each page is only one little piece of the album as a whole. So it’s all good!

Here are the last few weeks that you haven’t seen:

Another week has actually passed since I started writing this, so I have made another PL spread with pictures of an outing I took to Seattle with a friend, a couple of pictures I snagged off the internet about Richard III, an image from my new favorite song – Thrift Shop by Seattle rapper Macklemore (as catchy as Gangnam Style, and he’s another artist who got a big break with an awesome viral video – Billboard #1! awesome. I should’ve listened to it months ago when Laura told me about it), some pictures of my favorite 3 year olds using the cameras I got them for Xmas (love!), and a couple of items I received in the snail mail – a note (and stamp) from Em and a Lunar New Year’s card (and stamp) from Kaydee that I cropped and reconstructed slightly to fit in a 4×6 pocket. I even added a skeleton leaf I found in the garden, tiny and almost perfect! (it’s on the pink circle on the photo below left) Did you know that skeleton leaves are made in wet weather, even though they look so very dry? I think the leaf rots and leaves the veins. I find partially skeletonized leaves, especially holly leaves, all the time in the winter, but never something so complete and adorable as this one. I used two flip pockets this week to include more photos and journaling. I needed more real estate this week, and I could have added some ephemera if I’d had more space.

I needed to censor a few details on these pages – I used what I had handy – quarters and alphabet stamps!

Thanks for looking.

Jo:)

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