In order to try to avoid boring people with material they aren't interested in, I have divided my writing up into five separate blogs. The downside to this is that I have a tendency to wander from one area of interest to another over the course of a typical year, so it may look like I've dropped off the face of the earth. In case anyone is interested in following what is going on in one of my other blogs, I thought it might be useful to post this road map once in a while.
Geek Like Me Too is my general-purpose personal blog. The most recent postings are about a recent Jonathan Coulton concert in Pontiac that I attended and recorded. I have provided recordings of the show as a set of MP3 files, of interest to geeks who like music.
Geek Like Me is its predecessor, done in Blosxom, now still up only for archival purposes.
Geek Versus Guitar is about guitar playing. Recently I've recorded a few Jonathan Coulton songs myself. It will also be about learning to produce songs with my home studio.
Praise, Curse, and Recurse is about programming topics, mostly Haskell, Python, and Scheme. My free time has been devoted to other things but I will no doubt be back around to programming before too long.
The Marcella Armstrong Memorial Collection is about my family history, and the big task of scanning, restoring, preserving, and archiving family photos and documents. Of interest to any family members, but also of possible interest to people doing their own similar projects.
Tales from the Potts House: William Hope Hodgson contains information about the "Hodgecast" podcast available on iTunes, in which I record classic William Hope Hodgson novels and stories. I have more podcasts planned in both this series and possibly others in the near future.
Anyway, there it is... please join me on any of these blogs that might catch your interest. I always have far too many projects going at once!
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Brian at Seventeen
I think this may have been Brian's high school graduation photo, but I'm not entirely certain, since I have several similar ones.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
March of 1973
The skin tones are kind of ghastly after rough color restoration, but here we are! I was five, he was three.
I am hoping to eventually acquire some of the more specialized Photoshop plugins for doing more accurate and nuanced color correction.
I am hoping to eventually acquire some of the more specialized Photoshop plugins for doing more accurate and nuanced color correction.
Color Shift
Here is an excellent example of how the scanner software can correct very faded photographs. Here is a grade-school portrait of Brian; I think this might have been from the first grade:
The original is terribly faded:
It still could benefit from some work; the colors have faded unevenly. But even so, it is quite a surprise to find that he was wearing green!
The original is terribly faded:
It still could benefit from some work; the colors have faded unevenly. But even so, it is quite a surprise to find that he was wearing green!
Brian Dennis Potts
His middle name comes from our great-grandfather, Richard Armstrong's father, Dennis Armstrong, whom we never met. And I forgot his birthday!
Sorry, Brian!
Sorry, Brian!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Best of the Blue Album Web Gallery
These are my favorite pictures from the blue album. Uploading pictures to Blogger seems to be pretty unreliable, so I am hosting them offsite. Here is the link:
The Best of the Blue Album Web Gallery
This gallery contains about 51 images at modest sizes for web viewing. The files were created by using Aperture's Web Gallery feature. The original album has about 150 pictures.
The Best of the Blue Album Web Gallery
This gallery contains about 51 images at modest sizes for web viewing. The files were created by using Aperture's Web Gallery feature. The original album has about 150 pictures.
The Blue Album, Page 10
This is one of the digital photos I took of a page in the Blue Album. These were done just for a reference as to how the prints and captions were laid out on the page. These are photos that I also have as slides, although I also found a couple of prints of slides that are missing from the sets of slides.
The Blue Album, the Missing Photos
These are the photos of Linda that I managed to miss when making my high-resolution scans. I think there is another copy of at least one of them in the collection.
The Blue Album
Before our family vacation, I was able to take apart and scan the pages from a large-format photo album that I'll just call the "Blue Album." This album was easy to disassemble because it was held together with a string. The full pages were too large to fit on the scanner, but I took digital photos of each page to help preserve the layout, and then took a high-resolution scan of each photo, and a lower-resolution scan of each caption.
The photographs in the Blue Album are in mixed condition -- some of the black-and-white portraits are absolutely mint, but many of the color snapshots are fading badly. The pages are fibrous, acidic black construction paper, as was commonly used. It sheds little black fibers everywhere, so despite my best efforts at cleaning the scanner glass and dusting the pages between scans there are little black fibers on some of the images. I will need to do some extra cleanup with Photoshop in some cases. Some individual pictures have torn spots where glue has stuck to the prints, but most of them are in decent enough shape. I considered various preservation options up to possibly soaking the prints off the pages, but in the end just reassembled the album and put it in a sturdy drop-front box from Archival Methods. I made several gold DVD+R backups of the images. I will eventually get these sent off to Linda.
Anyway, we took the train to Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I took the album in its big black box with me. I presented the reassembled "Blue Album" to the family. Linda and David got a chance to look at it, and Joan and Don took it back to Myrtle Beach, along with Marcella Armstrong's journal. I have not yet finished reading and transcribing the journal yet, so I am hoping to borrow it back at some point, and perhaps to get it bound in a new cover while I'm at it.
Meanwhile, I have also done a first round of cleanup and enhancement on the images from the blue album. I am trying to come up with a more efficient workflow -- uploading images individually to Blogger tends to be very slow and unreliable. Aperture can export a web album, so I'm trying that. I've taken my picks for the best photos from the Blue Album and put them into a web album. On this G5 iMac, Aperture takes a very long time to generate the web album -- in fact, it has been at it for a couple of hours, but the time estimate keeps going up, not down. When it is done, I will upload this web gallery separately to my Dreamhost space and provide a link here.
While assembling the gallery, I realized that I apparently missed scanning the images from one of the album pages. These are three black-and-white portraits of Linda. The page they are attached to was badly torn, so I probably was having trouble getting the photos onto the scanner without tearing the page apart completely. I must have set it aside to scan later and then reassembled the book without getting to them. Fortunately, I do have the low-resolution digital photo of that particular album page, although it shows some distortion due to the angle. I may also have other copies of one or more of these prints elsewhere in the collection. If not, I'll have to see if I can eventually get these three portraits scanned.
One last thing -- while there are numerous pictures of me in this album, including some I don't think exist elsewhere in the collection, there are unfortunately none of my brother Brian. Apparently this album was assembled before pictures of Brian were available. This doesn't mean there aren't lots of pictures of Brian! I have many, many more in the collection, and will get to them as I work my way through the project.
The photographs in the Blue Album are in mixed condition -- some of the black-and-white portraits are absolutely mint, but many of the color snapshots are fading badly. The pages are fibrous, acidic black construction paper, as was commonly used. It sheds little black fibers everywhere, so despite my best efforts at cleaning the scanner glass and dusting the pages between scans there are little black fibers on some of the images. I will need to do some extra cleanup with Photoshop in some cases. Some individual pictures have torn spots where glue has stuck to the prints, but most of them are in decent enough shape. I considered various preservation options up to possibly soaking the prints off the pages, but in the end just reassembled the album and put it in a sturdy drop-front box from Archival Methods. I made several gold DVD+R backups of the images. I will eventually get these sent off to Linda.
Anyway, we took the train to Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I took the album in its big black box with me. I presented the reassembled "Blue Album" to the family. Linda and David got a chance to look at it, and Joan and Don took it back to Myrtle Beach, along with Marcella Armstrong's journal. I have not yet finished reading and transcribing the journal yet, so I am hoping to borrow it back at some point, and perhaps to get it bound in a new cover while I'm at it.
Meanwhile, I have also done a first round of cleanup and enhancement on the images from the blue album. I am trying to come up with a more efficient workflow -- uploading images individually to Blogger tends to be very slow and unreliable. Aperture can export a web album, so I'm trying that. I've taken my picks for the best photos from the Blue Album and put them into a web album. On this G5 iMac, Aperture takes a very long time to generate the web album -- in fact, it has been at it for a couple of hours, but the time estimate keeps going up, not down. When it is done, I will upload this web gallery separately to my Dreamhost space and provide a link here.
While assembling the gallery, I realized that I apparently missed scanning the images from one of the album pages. These are three black-and-white portraits of Linda. The page they are attached to was badly torn, so I probably was having trouble getting the photos onto the scanner without tearing the page apart completely. I must have set it aside to scan later and then reassembled the book without getting to them. Fortunately, I do have the low-resolution digital photo of that particular album page, although it shows some distortion due to the angle. I may also have other copies of one or more of these prints elsewhere in the collection. If not, I'll have to see if I can eventually get these three portraits scanned.
One last thing -- while there are numerous pictures of me in this album, including some I don't think exist elsewhere in the collection, there are unfortunately none of my brother Brian. Apparently this album was assembled before pictures of Brian were available. This doesn't mean there aren't lots of pictures of Brian! I have many, many more in the collection, and will get to them as I work my way through the project.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Civil War Bingo
I couldn't help trying to match up as many faces as I could between the two different group shots of Civil War soldiers. Here are the matches I came up with. Are they all correct?
Saturday, December 15, 2007
A Civil War Bagley?
Among the loose black and white prints I found a set of re-photographed Civil War pictures. They are kind of fuzzy and dark, but a little cleanup can restore the contrast wonderfully. I don't know who took them or where the original photographs were found.
First, here is a picture captioned "Group of 21st Iowa Infantry Volunteers." The fine print reads "Photo with Battle Flag at Dubuque, June 4, 1879. The Regiment was organized at Dubuque August, 1862."
The man in the upper right appears to be W. E. Bagley, Company C. I think he must be Dora Bagley's father, or my great great grandfather on Richard Armstrong's side.
My grandmother Marcella could not read the caption on the re-photographed picture that indicated who was who; on another copy of the group shot she wrote on the back that Richard Armstrong's grandfather was "in there somewhere." I can't read it with my naked eye either, but the scanner can magnify it enough to read:
There were also are some additional photographs of portraits. I presume there was some evidence that they were of the same man, but I don't have any documentation to back that up. Here are the portraits of the man who might be W. E. Bagley. I'd guess these were taken closer to 1862 than to 1879, but I don't have an exact date.
Here is a group shot taken in camp, presumably within a few years of 1862. It is unfortunately pretty blurry.
I've zoomed in on the blur that I think might be W. E. Bagley:
And last, another group shot, undated but perhaps taken a decade or so later than the other group portrait, maybe around 1889. It seems to show most of the soldiers in the first group shot.
I've again zoomed in on the man I think might be W. E. Bagley.
I chose this one in part by a process of elimination; I was able to pair up most of the men to a fairly high degree of certainty with their images in the earlier group portrait. But it is hard to be certain when the portraits were taken years apart, and so much of his face was covered by hair! The second man from the right in the bottom row is also a possibility.
I will keep a sharp eye out for any further information about W. E. Bagley. It seems unbelievable to have both Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers in my ancestry!
First, here is a picture captioned "Group of 21st Iowa Infantry Volunteers." The fine print reads "Photo with Battle Flag at Dubuque, June 4, 1879. The Regiment was organized at Dubuque August, 1862."
The man in the upper right appears to be W. E. Bagley, Company C. I think he must be Dora Bagley's father, or my great great grandfather on Richard Armstrong's side.
My grandmother Marcella could not read the caption on the re-photographed picture that indicated who was who; on another copy of the group shot she wrote on the back that Richard Armstrong's grandfather was "in there somewhere." I can't read it with my naked eye either, but the scanner can magnify it enough to read:
There were also are some additional photographs of portraits. I presume there was some evidence that they were of the same man, but I don't have any documentation to back that up. Here are the portraits of the man who might be W. E. Bagley. I'd guess these were taken closer to 1862 than to 1879, but I don't have an exact date.
Here is a group shot taken in camp, presumably within a few years of 1862. It is unfortunately pretty blurry.
I've zoomed in on the blur that I think might be W. E. Bagley:
And last, another group shot, undated but perhaps taken a decade or so later than the other group portrait, maybe around 1889. It seems to show most of the soldiers in the first group shot.
I've again zoomed in on the man I think might be W. E. Bagley.
I chose this one in part by a process of elimination; I was able to pair up most of the men to a fairly high degree of certainty with their images in the earlier group portrait. But it is hard to be certain when the portraits were taken years apart, and so much of his face was covered by hair! The second man from the right in the bottom row is also a possibility.
I will keep a sharp eye out for any further information about W. E. Bagley. It seems unbelievable to have both Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers in my ancestry!
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