Saturday, August 02, 2008

Geeking out

Now that I'm at my parents' house I keep creating projects for myself. I've been sorting through tons of my Grandma's stuff, since they were filling the dresser drawers that I wanted to use. We found a little leather wallet full of my Grandpa's pictures from his twenties, back before he moved from the United States to Canada. I did two Flickr photosets of them -- one of the pictures that Grandpa had of his time working for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) in California in the 1930s (and one picture from army training) and an entire set devoted to the small stack of portraits of Grandpa that I found in a pocket of the wallet. I love that set best of all. I scanned them at a high resolution but then didn't fix the pictures at all; I love them best with the flaws and fading.

These are so crazy to me because they're hardly recognisable as my Grandpa. Of course, a big part of that is the fact that he lost most of his hair during army training (oh, chemical exposure and the 1940s) and so before this I'd hardly ever seen pictures of him where he had hair.

Both the sentimentalist and the historian in me are geeking out.

Bored-looking Grandpa

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

what gorgeous eyes. wow.

Queen of West Procrastination said...

That's weird to hear, 'cuz he's my Grandpa.

The Blog Fodder said...

How do you repair old photos? What program are you using? I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 3. Can I do it withthat or do I need the full meal deal?

Queen of West Procrastination said...

I'm not very good at repairing old photos, Uncle Al. If I need to do more than just adjust the colour, I take it to Janice, who has the full Photoshop (and who calls herself a "Photoshop Ninja"). I think Chris is able to do many of the same things with a free open-source program called Gimp.

The Blog Fodder said...

Janice, you are NAMED and so I will pester you to fix a photo for me. Please???