Sometimes a Photograph

My daughter, our youngest kid, took some photographs for me last week at my high school class reunion. I never expected such excellence!
by Charlie Leck

I’ve been blown away by some photographs in the last few days. A good friend forwarded an email he received from one of his friends that included an array of wonderful historical photographs that just grabbed my attention and gave me a number of rich, wonderful viewing moments. I spent a considerable time examining nearly every one of them. If I can get permission, I’ll share them here on my blog for you to see also (as of this moment I don’t know what the copyright provisions are).

For this moment, however, I want to share a few very artistic photographs my daughter took at my high school class reunion last week. I had asked her to come out to NJ with me to take photographs of each of the attending classmates and, perhaps, their spouses. She did.

I never expected such startling and beautiful results. Cynthia is a student right now at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. To this point, she isn’t planning to make this a profession, but just a serious hobby. She’s also working on an advanced degree in the field of education.

I want to share a few of these photographs for your enjoyment. That’s all. You don’t know these former school chums of mine, but I’m betting you’ll still feel a bit of the emotion I felt when I looked at these and others.

Sometimes a photograph can be more than a casual snapshot. We, who too often pull out our iPhones or mini-cameras to casually take little reminders of moments, should remember and appreciate the remarkable power of extraordinary photography – and how it goes far beyond film or video in capturing the power of its subject. Go, for instance, to the web site of the Richard Avedon Foundation and look there at the extraordinary work of one of the masters.

For now, however, enjoy these works of my daughter.

  

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Rescuing Our 35mm Slides

This photograph came off a slide. It's a picture of our youngest
daughter's 5th grade class and many of their little kindergarten buddies.

This blog was rearranged, edited and reposted at 6:20 PM (CST) on 18 January 2011

The 3mm slide project is well under way, but what an effort it is.
by Charlie Leck

I knew it would be time consuming and difficult, but it was my number one new year’s resolution and so I’m tackling it with gusto. I’m trying to save all those 35mm photograph slides – hundreds of them – that are piled in one of our closets before they deteriorate any further. I didn’t realize, 40 years ago, when I was taking family photographs, and shots of my travels far and wide, that both my photographs and my 35mm slides would deteriorate so; however, chemical changes do damage both, causing the colors to change and a lot of their original brilliance and contrast to be lost. Even though they were boxed and kept in a dark closet, somehow specks of dust and dirt found their way to the surfaces of this Mylar base material on which the photographs were originally developed. Humidity, temperature and dust are all great enemies of slides.

So, I asked for and received for Christmas a marvelous Plustek (OpticFilm 7600) slide scanner. It’s a lovely piece of equipment, but its techniques and intricacies are not exactly easy to learn. The terrific photograph guru, Taz Talley, has a manual for the machine that sells for over $250 – nearly half the price of the machine. I worked my way along with the manufacturer’s manual, translated awkwardly from the original German, and I seem to be making progress. Each instance of success pleases me. I’m probably through about 350 of the slides right now.

Here are a few examples of my success… along with one before-and-after example… I've had a hard time getting them to line up properly, but you'll get the idea.

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This is an enjoyable snap-shot of Anne's son, Jimmy, taken in 1982 when he would have been about 13. It was in terrible condition and nearly all the color was lost. Now it's digitized, corrected and its saved on disks and can be printed for our family albums. The disks, when I'm done with this project can be saved and copied so that all the children can have one of them.

This 1961 photograph of Anne, traveling in Europe when she was only 16. The slide had lost all of its color and was incredibly dirty. Between my new LaserSoft Imaging scanner from Germany and time on PhotoShop, we were able to restore it to respectable condition.

And this is a wonderful 1978 photograph of Anne that I took before we were married. We were visiting a cousin of mine who lived in Switzerland and her home was done in lots of rich and enjoyable colors. All those colors seemed to be lost in a slide that was covered with specks of dust and had lots of scratches. A run through the scanner brought back the colors and the machine can separate out dust and dirt from what is really on the slide film itself. I couldn't be happier about saving this delightful photograph of the young woman with whom I'd fallen in love.

It would have been disastrous to lose this photograph that Anne took in 1980 at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in Windsor, England. It is of Prince Philip driving a four-in-hand of his Cleveland Bay horses in a dressage test at the show. When I first looked at this slide through a hand viewer, I was certain is was worthless and lost to us. My new scanner said it was still good to go. I corrected and saved over 200 slides from that horse show.

This snapshot means the world to us. Anne and Lisa have just finished doing a little skating during the winter of 1980. They are on a frozen pond in the front of the boyhood home of Warner Bruntjen and his parents. Who of us would have known then that Lisa and Warner would marry a number of years later? It would be a shame if this photograph had been lost to us.

And this is a terrific snap-shot of a legend in our lives, Bill Remley. Bill died in the past year and I wrote a blog here about him after his death. I searched so diligently for this very photograph to use on the blog and couldn't find it. Now it's turned up during my slide restoration project. I remember taking this photograph in 1982.

This slide was very badly scratched and faded. I was very excited to get it restored this well. It's of daughters, Erika and Jenny, with our dog, Seato. It was taken at our home on Lake Minnetonka in either 1978 or 1979. It looks like Seato must have just come up from a dip in the water.

And this is a funny 1980 picture of Anne's very first lambs, bought to be pets around our house on Hunter Drive. Now they've turned into an industry that keeps Anne working as hard and long as anyone possibly could. One of these black lambs was named "Hope" and the other was "Faith."

A 1980 photo of Lisa, preparing to ride in a local parade. The slide was in incredibly poor condition and I almost tossed it. Fortunately, I decided to give it one run through the scanner and then loaded it on PhotoShop. Neat!

Here's a before and after example of what I'm trying to explain here. This was the way this slide looked when I first loaded it into my new slide scanner. You can see that its color has deteriorated badly. That stuff at the top of the slide is dust, dirt and scratches. Had I not seen what my new scanner and some time in a software program called Lightroom could do, I probably would have just tossed out this snap-shot that is very precious to us.

So, this is what that slide looked like when I saved it to a digital format... AND, you are looking at a very low resolution of the image, which this blog requires so that it isn't overwhelmed by massive, high-resolution images. I'm extremely proud that we have this shot of a pony we owned in the 80s that performed brilliantly at horse shows and competed fantastically against full-sized horses in open jumping competitions with his usual rider, Janie, who is pictured here with our pony, Angel.

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Enough, I guess. I think you get an idea of the size of my project and the success that I'm having. For those of you with old slides that look desperately bad, don't lose hope. They can be saved and returned to the former rich look they once had.

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Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

The Whole World’s a Photography Studio

And all the people in it merely models!
by Charlie Leck

We're almost all photographers today! The digital camera has been a revolutionary household and family device. Digital cameras range from the extreme to the extremely simple. They take very good to spectacular photographs. Instead of worrying about how much film we have, we can shoot photos by the hundreds and hundreds and delete the bad ones as we go along. With modestly priced computer software programs we can enhance, correct and improve our photos with ease. If we are willing to use a little patience and time, we can archive our photographs to last for many generations to come.

So why are we still getting so many very awful digital photographs?

I have lots of dear friends and members of my family who want to be better digital photographers, but they don't want to take the time to go to classes and learn some of the principles. I feel the same way. I have too many other wonderful things to do; yet I want my photographs to be something about which I can be proud.

Enter Rick Sammon!

Rick Sammon is an extraordinary photographer. One can find hundreds and hundreds – thousands and thousands – of these guys (and gals) on the World Wide Web. Their photographs will dazzle you and leave you in envious rapture. I have visited more of these web sites than I care to admit. I've found none more comfortable than the home of Rick Sammon and, if you want to improve your work with a digital camera, I recommend it to you without reservation. But, without going to the site, I can summarize for you four of Rick's rules of photography that will immediately make you a better digital photographer. These tips will improve your work whether you are shooting with a mighty SLR or a simple, compact beauty! Here they are.

(1) FILL THE FRAME! One of the biggest mistakes many amateur photographers make is that they allow too much of the background – often uninteresting and boring – into the photograph. They stand miles away from the subject and present us with an image of Aunt Mable that takes up about one-fifth of the photo frame and she is surrounded by cars in the Walmart parking lot. Instead, move in and fill the frame with Aunt Mable if she is your subject. Did you mean to include that that 1999 Lexus with the rusted front fender and the sign instructing us to return our carts to that particular spot? Come-on! Of course you didn't. It would take only a second to jog forward and FILL THE FRAME with Aunt Margaret (with perhaps only a glimpse of the big W on the Walmart sign). Remember, always FILL THE FRAME.

(2) SHOOT TIGHT! If you want maximum sharpness in your photo, shoot it up as tight as you can. If you're downtown in New York City and you want to shoot a photograph of the Statue of Liberty, get up as tight as you can on her. You are not photographing the harbor, right? You're photographing the famous lady? Get the lady in your photograph and, perhaps, the benches in Battery Park. If you do mean to photograph her and the entire harbor, pay attention to tip #4.

These are not complicated rules we're talking about here, but we are always violating them. My wonderful wife is always shooting photographs of horses that she wants me to process. The photographs are always of the out-buildings on the farm, the loyal assistant who is holding the horse and the trash cans behind the barn. By the time I've cropped out all the surrounding unwanted filler, we have very little resolution left in the photograph. It isn't so difficult, SHOOT TIGHT. You want a photograph of your first grandchild. Get up close and get a photograph of her. I'm not interested in the stop sign behind her.

(3) SEE EYE TO EYE! This one is pretty crucial. I love to get photographs of my grandkids. Don't take them from your position as a 6 foot 8 inch uncle. That little kid is barely 2 feet tall. Somehow, make the effort to get down to her level. Let me see a photograph of my little sweet heart as she really looks. Forget the bird's eye views. And please, it's the same for photographs of pets. Don't shoot pictures of your pets from 5 feet above them. Make an effort to get eye to eye. This is one of the primary rules of photography and makes a world of difference.

(4) DEAD CENTER IS DEADLY! You bet, Rick. Thanks for the reminder. If you are going to include some background in your shot, don't always make your subject the dead-center object in the picture. The photograph will turn out much more interestingly if the subject is slightly off center or even off to the side in the total presentation. Remember though to get your focus set on the subject and then move the camera so that subject is off to the side.

Oh, what difference does it make? Well, if you're sending me photographs of the ones I love, none whatsoever. I still enjoy seeing their beautiful, smiling faces. If you want to give them a little more lasting jazz, take the above tips from Rick Sammon to heart.

All the ideas presented above are completely and unabashedly stolen from the fabulous photographer, Rick Sammon.