A Pile of Long-Lost Slides

I found a handful of loose slides and today I'm scanning them. This batch needs a lot of hand-restoration with Photoshop; I'll leave the touchup of dirt and scratches to later, but just getting the colors even remotely correct has been a challenge, since these are old and have not been properly stored.

This one seems to be me, on the right, maybe circa 1969, in Seattle, but I'm not certain where. Is this in my yard at the time? I don't know. I think the boy on the left is Michael, the son of my mom's friend whose name escapes me at the moment. I look to be about two. I've never seen this picture before. There's probably a story behind it. The slide is marked July 1970, and I think my parents' relationship was either hopelessly broken or badly damaged at this point. I don't look happy. But maybe I'm reading too much into it. When I look at it I feel as if I'm on the verge of remembering what it was like to be that two-year-old boy (I had not yet turned three), as if those memories are still in there somewhere!


This next one was over-exposed to begin with and the dyes are very faded, meaning that it lets most light of the light from the scanner through, and comes out almost white. This means it requires a lot of darkening and contrast-enhancement to see much of anything, and there is hardly any color left to correct. I'm sure a pro could get this looking better, but here it is: Richard, Joan, and Susan Armstrong perhaps around 1955. Are they all in the water? The way the shot is framed, it is hard to tell. Hand-written on the slide is "at Sun Lake, Washington."


Next, a fantastic photo of my mom. This one was remarkably well-preserved. The slide is stamped "61R" which I'm thinking might indicate 1961 -- was this taken at Fircrest School?


This next one is my father's family in Eatonville, Washington: Thanksgiving, 1975. I'm not certain who everyone is, but Amby, Mary, Elmer, Sally, Aaron, and Ted I recognize.


And finally, my mother at Niagara Falls. My father wrote "Fascination" on a label on the slide's cardboard holder! The colors have held up reasonably well but this slide is badly stained and very dirty. I was able to clean some of the gunk off with emulsion cleaning fluid but it will still need a lot of touch-up in Photoshop if I'm ever going to use this one for high-resolution printing.

More Washington Slides

Wow, that's quite a colorful wedding dress!



Amby looks so young! And my father does too, of course. I think he was 25 when he married my mother. That seems young to me; I was 34 when I got married in 2001.

A Special Commencement

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!