CARS, KIDS, DOGS AND CATS

Old cars always have a certain photograph personality. Rarely do we see a picture of a car without a proud owner beaming a smile, or as we see below the car, in days of old was transformed into camping vehicles with all things possible tied down to hoods, running boards, trunks or assorted other body panels.

I tried to nail down the brand of car shown above by asking my elderly car nuts whom I see on a regular basis. Looking at the two by three picture they could not put a tag on it, but one gentleman who is a major collector said he thought it might be a REO. The lower self made camping-fishing mobile was a Chevrolet.

The husband wife team I know. In later years I was her private nurse so the book of over a hundred black and whites was given to me after her death of a healthy 91. Her husband I never met but he was by all accounts a very bright man who was both a Chiropractor and an MD in Los Angeles. Likely the couple had visited Big Bear Lake for a fishing weekend. The cutesy gal on the running board, eh, not likely.

Back to the upper picture. This photo is very old. I spent many hours trying to rehab it and considering it was a small photo with extreme fading I was surprised at the results. Was that my friend inside? Can't say. A small cat suddenly appeared on the bottom which was not visible by the naked eye.




Children young and old were and still are snapshot favorites. Of course, when the two pictures were taken the camera was far different than today's film or digital camera. A small 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 picture was placed in the album and likely looked at for several generations. We loved them, fuzzy dark and all. Of course with the Brownie, we had to be outside staring at the bright sun for the optimal snapshot since there was no flash bulbs and just one setting for the lens. Later cameras came with bellows and flash attachments. More on the history of cameras in blogs to come.

The girl above taught me a great lesson. She needed a lot of work to clean up her cute face. There was a lot of shadow to remove as well as a ton of "noise". After working on it for about three hours the computer shut down on me and I lost all the work. Photo Shop does not automatically save your work! You must start out with a file name and save, save, save. There is also a way to empty your cache after performing every task you perform. When that fills up, then bang, you run out of memory and in my case, all the work was lost. Ahh, live and learn. The sad part--I knew about the memory cache and failed to put into action my newly acquired knowledge.

The scanner does a lot of the work, but when you enlarge the shot, and fine tune the photograph, the more work it creates. Both of the shots are circa 1920's and would the owners be amazed at what snapshot lovers could do 80 years down the road.

I love both photographs. The innocence of the young girl, all dressed up in her winter coat and hat compared to the ingenuity of the young lad with his Little Rascal set up. Boys had to use their imagination back then, as well as what ever stuff they could find laying around to create the dream machines. In the above photo notice the spoon and pump pail. Both objects were not visible in the photo. The spoon, just a light background object, looks huge. That was the prospective you got with the small lens. The pail sat in a dark shadow and needed a lot of work to bring it back to life. I could have ignored it, but that is part of the restoration.

The face of the girl was also shadowed so I had to enlarge it about 200 percent and start eliminating the shadow, spot by spot, hundreds of them. Suddenly she had eyes and a cute nose. You really have to love black and whites to do all the work. So this is my photograph album for the world to see.

I have numerous more photos to scan and clean up. I have run into memory problems so I am downloading hundreds of photos onto thumb drives. I am pricing external hard drives to use until I cash out on the new computer. Patience is a virtual I am learning but the account is growing.

Be sure to hit on the photos to enlarge them