SCHOOL DAYS PLUS TWO

I am a bit late on my promised School Days issue of Shadows of America. I can peel off numerous excuses for being rather slow on posting--but if you are followers of this site you know my latest gig on restoring photos is still on the learning curve. Between battering my hard head against the desk because my vintage 2003 Sony computer is slowing down to crawl, so much that even I can move faster than it and whoopee, getting a few paying gigs caused this site to grow a few cobwebs.

What we have today is a pile of school photos, plus a couple that are not school related, but since they are too cute the pictures had to find a home here. Likely your first reaction on viewing the pictures would be, yikes, I remember my school photos! The companies that traveled from school to school never heard of photo retouching or imagined something like Photo Shop. How many of us were Hollywood material? Ahem, be truthful. I was the school dwarf, in the fact I was the second smallest pigeon toed, knock kneed, skinniest kid in elementary school who became the amazing growing bean sprout in my freshman year.

My 81 year old friend Jack gave me these photos which date from 1928 to early 1932. Likely all the pictures came from from Southern Ohio near the West Virginia border which was an Appalachian area. Part two of the school kids, which I hope to have up in the next couple of days show the opposite of what we see in today's school photos. Children often wore homemade clothing and bibs to get their mug shots. The photos we see were likely the only pictures the family could afford.


In many of the school photos you will see more than one child at the sitting. I can not be sure why, perhaps it was cheaper to double up with two family members to save money, which in this case, being an Appalachian area was likely the reason. Perhaps it was fashionable back then to have to siblings in one pose.

Did Jay Leno grow up in the Appalachians? Is it just me or do you see the similarity. Just a reminder as we go through the pictures, all the photos went through two stages of restoration before they were posted. First the scanner cleaned up the pictures a bit, then the photos all went through a mild Photo Shop clean up to remove smudges and fingerprints.

Dare we forget the teachers? Here we have the typical Mrs Crabtree. This photo almost got tossed because it had ink stains all over the top but it cleaned up pretty nice. I am sure she told her students to clean up nice for the photographer so it is only fitting I do the same. The face of my teachers are well embedded in my mind but I have no pictures of them

Handsome young man indeed..

One thing I have learned from this new adventure of restoring photos is beware of overkill. It is easy to attack every visible flaw , but one must remember that you are restoring not re-shooting the photo. After spending hours on do-overs, I often ended up erasing the whole mess and started all over because it looked terrible.

Nearly every photo here had only enough touch-up to to erase old marks and scratches. I have a few secret touches that make the photo look brand new and crisp. True, many photos dug out of grandma's trunk have issues because of the type of camera or age of the photo but every photo brings its own challenge. But photos like these are a lot nicer than the original but like a little work goes a long way.

What would happen if a student showed up in an old pair of bibs today? It was not an issue back then. Likely that was all he had to wear and as you can see they certainly were not a new pair. Still, he was a nice handsome young man who did after all comb his hair.

I don't think all kids liked to have their brother in the picture. Maybe the boy on the left just didn't want his picture taken. You can say he just didn't want to smile, but look at those furrowed eyebrows.

Alright, I could have Photo Shopped this to be Alfred E. Nueman and his popular "What me worry," look. Like I said early on, we were not charming or handsome. That is what I like about kids, they were pretty much candid and posing often may have been uncomfortable but smiles or frowns made the shot.

Often you could see deep in the soul of a child through a photo. When I started to clean up this young girl's picture I debated whether or not to remove the wound on her forehead as well as the black eye on the right side. I did clean up the eye a tad bit, but I could not clean up her thoughts. I wouldn't dare. Where did the wounds come from? I have my ideas.

I have often seen pictures that make tears well up in my eyes. This photo makes me want to reach into the photo and give her a big hug. Enough of my emotional commentary.
I said there was two photos that didn't fit the page. Maybe I can make it just one photo by saying these two kids were on their way to the one room school house where brother and sister disappeared to every day. The photos came from the same area so they got tossed on to the page.

Like I said, every photo needs its own touches to bring out the best. This picture took a bit of work to make it look new and crisp. One thing I do when I restore is look for the new version of the picture. Some people like to make a new picture look old by applying sepia tone. In restoring a photo I take away the sepia that time put on the picture. In most cases the sepia tone was not part of the photo. If the customer wants the aged look I can do that. Once the aged look disappears you have the photos that the previous owner had on the mantle once upon a time.

This photo I discovered was taken by a traveling photographer who roamed the countryside with the pony in tow. When a business would give him permission he set up the camera and waited for customers. I have talked to many older seniors who remembered the traveling photographer.

When I saw this photo I thought that was one lucky girl who owned her own pony. Didn't we all want our own pony?

Any photo seen on this site are available in a 5 x 7 format for $10 each. And yes, I do retouching. Tell me what you have for an estimate.

If you have a photo you think would look good here let me know.