Washington Slides (Details)

Amby and Mary Potts, my grandparents on my father's side. These slides are in far better shape than I was expecting. The sharpness and color are wonderful!


I don't remember the circumstances of this next photo. I'm guessing it was about 1977, on a trip to Washington.


This next one was taken at Mount Rushmore:


From left to right (back row): my grandfather Amby (holding Brian), my grandmother Mary, Yours Truly, Ted, my grandmother Marcella, my grandfather Richard, and in front: Sally and my mother Susan. To the best of my knowledge this is the only picture in the collection to show all four of my grandparents together; having them all in one place during my lifetime was an extremely rare, possibly unique, event!

Don't judge the slides by these screen images; they tend to be grainy and a little dull. The last image looks particularly bad on the web; my apologies. The original has an extremely wide dynamic range with highlights and shadows from direct sun, and some very saturated colors. To get a good version for printing, I needed to tweak it quite a bit and apply a lot of unsharp masking, and that tweaked image then doesn't look very good when converted back to the sRGB color space (technically, it exceeds the gamut of sRGB) and the highly sharpened image becomes gritty-looking when I reduce it back to screen resolution. Ideally, I'd go directly from the uncorrected 6400 dpi master to the different derived files (for printing and web) in completely separate processes. If this doesn't make any sense to you, be glad you don't stay up late worrying about things like this (but be glad someone does).

There are a lot more slides, but it is 3:30 in the morning and I have to get some sleep! These images are so sharp and lifelike, I really am enthralled with them!