Judging from the inscription on the back of this photo, it was taken in 1974 as what I assume was part of a wedding album. This still very young lady is the wife of an old friend, tough mentor and shipmate from my earlier life as a fleet sailor.
His request was simple and welcome. His still remarkable and beautiful wife was retiring and he needed me to restore and enlarge a portrait of her for a surprise party honoring and celebrating her transition from hard working spouse to retired and, most likely, hard working spouse.
I got the camera thing going on early in my life. My first camera was a Kodak Pocket Instamatic 110 for my birthday in 1973. I have no photos from that time, but later on I saved enough to purchase a Sears Brand Pentax SLR. I set up my own darkroom and developed my own film, favoring Ilford HP 5 over Kodak’s offerings.
Color Picture of a open stall owner in Pusan, Korea. Image was recovered from a color negative. Howard J King 1984
It was a big mistake to take this photo. Koreans are very suspicious of having their photo taken; candid moments are included. She heard the shutter noise and let loose a stream of what I image was some serious Korean profanity, chasing me off the street and into another part of town. Continue reading Pusan South Korea, 1983. Scanning and Restoring a Negative→
“… know this is very grainy. I have the print. If there’s anything at all you could do with a higher resolution scan of this one I’d owe you for life.”
What do you do when someone you haven’t laid eyes on for 30 years asks a favor of you? Well, if 30 years ago, you, him and 220 other guys were stuffed in a 450 foot floating tub made of steel, aluminum, asbestos, oil, grease, paint, sweat, body odor and really monotonous food, and somehow, you did’t get your brains beat out, then you really owe him a favor.
There are a thousand reasons why a picture doesn’t come out right: bad weather, poor lighting, light temperature at the wrong setting. Camera settings can be a major culprit when dealing with even a modest prosumer camera.
Please note: I hope this post to be informative and I use several screen captures and the resolution of the images has been left at a relatively high dpi. I hope this will add to the post, but may require a bit of patience when loading the galleries.
I estimate this picture was taken in 1983 due in part to the existing sensor and weapons mounts. I have a box someplace of picture that look similar to this one on the left. We all thought our pictures would last forever back then. But like the photos our parents stored in shoe boxes and photo albums, the chemical process that created our images eventually fails and the image fades away. Continue reading The Progression of a Restoration Project→
Virginia Wadell Elledge Goodall. Photo restored from deteriorated paper. Photograph taken circa 1925. Restoration by Howard J King
This is something I worked on back in 1997. At least that is what the file date is on the old Iomega zipdisk I found in storage. This picture was taken of my great grandmother in the 1920’s and had suffered in a stack of boxes in a garage for some time. I was using Photoshop 3.0 at the time and it was a time consuming and difficult process to restore to a printable form. I was glad to get a copy of it to my grandfather a few years before he died.
The sad part is, I never met her and never learned her name.
The Digital Lens 