A Restoration

I’m enjoying these restorations. More and more they are convincing me that the part of this process I enjoy the most is the finish work. I love taking something that is damaged and making it look nice again.  And some of these family pictures are so rare that they have such deep value.

This is my wife’s parents. She had an old faded 5×7 that was apparently made from a 2×2 original. It was framed without glass, so it was scratched up prettly badly and had dirt embedded in the emulsion.

Mom and Dad Stebbins

Her hair is a little darker than I would like, but there just wasn’t any detail there. I’d rather have it too dark than washed out. Her neck was tough. The original was pretty bent up there so after being copied, then faded, then scanned it wasn’t pretty. I think its alright now.

It may not look like it but this is a step forward on my restoration process. Up until now I’ve pretty much just cleaned them up, modified the color balance and added contrast. On this one I replaced some missing elements. They are small (her hair and her chin) but they helped a lot.

60 Seconds of Beauty

Dead Horse Point at Sunset

It only took me 3 years to pull this together, but here it is, finally.

When I went to Arches in May of 2010, I shot a short series of stills from Dead Horse Point as the sun went down. My intention at the time was to do a simple animation.  I dropped the color because it wasn’t adding anything. The point was to capture the movement of the light and that is stronger in B&W.

I think its simple, but powerful.

I hope you like it.

(It looks way better if you view it from Vimeo – click on the vimeo tag on the bottom right)

The Rowley Family

My cousin asked me to do some family portraits for them. Their two youngest sons were leaving for LDS missions and this would be the last time the entire family would be together for awhile. So they wanted to get some pictures.

They wanted it outside, but this is the middle of Feburary in Idaho and there ain’t much out there this time of year. So we went with an indoor session.

Now this isn’t a small family. There were 32 people, 14 grandkids. I shot individual shots of each grandchild, family shots of the parents with their kids, just their kids, just them and a few of the kids families. It was a busy time – somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 shots. It was fun .

I edited and rough finished all of the pictures except the 3-4 biggest group pictures in 2 days. The big group pictures took a bit longer since I had to move faces around and extend the background, and do my other job. I finished and posted everything in a week.

Here are the proofs.

Gallery_2013 Rowley Proofs