Five Old Pictures in Search of an Explanation

Up in the sky of 1943, it's.....

AS LONG AS WE ARE LOOKING AT OLD PICTURES FROM LOS ANGELES:

One of my tasks to prepare for my mother's 90th birthday was to create a "memory wall" out of photographs spanning her life. My brother went through her albums and brought me some sixty old pictures, in varying degrees of preservation, to have scanned and printed.

One of the pictures he brought for scanning was this one (reproduced at approximately the size of the original):

Mom & Dad, just married, Los Angeles

It would have been taken in the mountains above Los Angeles on some day in either 1943 or 1944. Like a lot of the others it had dirt, scratches and smudges, but I was sure I could clean up the image. Then I started to look more carefully at the smudges in this shot once it had been scanned.

Here's a section of that shot blown up from the scan and sharpened with the contrast boosted:

And a closer section from the shot, blown up even more and enhanced:

Closer still and bumped up another notch:

And then, at the end, this:

I don't know if I should clean up this scan and get rid of these smudges or not.

[Originally published on Novermber 25, 2004]

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):

Posted by Vanderleun at March 18, 2006 1:38 PM | TrackBack
Save to del.icio.us