I’m always intending to amaze and delight by explaining the structure (sorry, choked on that one) of my day. Really, it’s fascinating. No. It is. So today, as I was slogging away at my Life’s Work, I pulled out a couple of nice little shots so I could put together a little power point for you: how I spent my afternoon – for the last year. There is another version I intend to serve up: What I Did With All Day Last Year, which features the book I made for my dad. But I’d have to pause to do that, which means it ain’t gonna go down soon.
I don’t scrap book. I take pictures and stick them into high quality, hoity-toity archive quality books on AQ paper, annotated with AQ ink – in case anybody ever wants to actually put our family photo-history in – yes – an archive. The problem with photographs used to be this: in order for each kid to have in his or her own possession the full history of the fam, I’d have to get ALL MY NEGATIVES (assuming I can find them all in their AQ glacine negative sleeves, tucked into their own AQ albums) reprinted, and then mount them all. All thirty five ninety page albums.
At least, that was the only alternative before – ta DA – Photoshop and Blurb. com. Now, all I have to do is scan every page in every album and then – ah, then – repair the ravages of time. I cannot believe how sienna these things have gone on me. Tucked away from the light, treasured. Gin’s 1980 baby pictures look AWFUL. My great great grandfather’s black and whites from the civil war era look a heck of a lot better. And factor in the wide range of quality (or not quality) of the labs I’ve used over the years – I mean, some of these shots couldn’t have been printed more poorly. So I go over each page, and each picture on each page – color correcting and restoring. After which, I will print all of these restored pages in hard back books and make sure my kids have the whole entire library.
I do this because I’ve loved our lives. And I want the kids to have those memories. Yeah, the books will probably fade, too. But I figure, if they last thirty years, I won’t know when they go bad. Or we can reprint them again twenty years from now with better ink. Assuming the world doesn’t blow itself up first.
So here’s the illustrated tour:
These are shots from Disneyland, in 1985. Shooting the fam at Disney is sort of like trying to take a picture of one guppy in a bowl full of fish – you’re going to catch incidental tails and fins all over the place. Last year, I came home with the bunch of Disney shots and was wrinkled nosed to find that I’d inadvertently captured a really, really well endowed and portly woman in a really, really – ummm – poor choice of a T shirt. But the fam part of the shot was important to me. So. I made the woman and her cleavage vanish. It was fun.
In this shot, there’s no cleavage, just a nice guy who happened to stumble (he does not appear to be stumbling) into my frame:
The thing is, I don’t know him. And he’s distracting, considering that his clothes are so bright and well cared for and all. So I stopped and took an hour or two, and invited him to leave the shot. He went quietly:
It really is fun to do this. And this is a quick and dirty job. But I feel so powerful when it works. After that, I did some color correction and brightened things up a bit.
I don’t do the dust – it’s already going to take the rest of my lifetime to get through the eighties – dust can be dealt with by subsequent generations.
Here is the original scan of the page –
I never noticed all the dust that had accumulated at the edges of the paper until I did this. The shots are dull now, colors muted and muddy. Since I am preparing the pages for print, I go for a little more contrast than I would if I were just doing this for screen, and I saturate the colors. And then the page looks like this:
So, that’s my life right now. Mornings with the horses and the treadmill and breakfast (assuming there’s bacon) and afternoons steadily gaining weight as I labor over a hot keyboard. Ain’t we got fun?
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