Tag: scan

Film Restoration

Screengrab from Blu-Ray restoration of "How The West Was Won" (smilebox version)
Screengrab from Blu-Ray restoration of “How The West Was Won” (smilebox version)

Ah restorations and remasters. I love ’em! (As evidenced by my continual project of digitizing and retouching my Dad’s photographic collection.)

Film remasters, audio remasters, photographic restorations, everything. It’s breathing new life into something old and making it look and sound the best it can, either by taking the original film stock, audio tape, or photograph, and giving it a high-resolution digital transfer that captures every detail.

(When it comes to film, the ironic thing is that once they’ve finished the digital restoration, a copy of that restoration goes right back onto new fine-grain film stock, and a digital copy goes into a server storage farm. This is due to the fact that long-term digital storage is shaky and formats change frequently.)

I’ve always wanted to get into the field, but there’s a lot to learn. A lot of time and work goes into restorations and remasters (film in particular).

To show just what goes into film restoring, I wandered around YouTube and found some videos that I believe detail the process fairly well.

(There are a number of them!) [Warning: Flash player ahead!]

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Digitizing

For the last few months I’ve been working at digitizing and posting old Kodachromes that were taken in the 1960s by my great-uncle, Jack Cuthbert. So far I’ve scanned about 10 magazines (about 30 slides per magazine) and I’ve uploaded 3 magazines so far to my Flickr page.

Most of them consist of Nova Scotia photographs, but others include some really neat shots of London somewhere in the early-to-mid 1960s. Haven’t gotten that far yet though, still entering metadata and info into the tags re: what the photos are of, where they were taken, etc.

About 70-80 photos are up on my Flickr so far, and there is more to come!

SEE THEM HERE!

A selection:

Photo of Rockville Notch, Nova Scotia, in 1961. Late afternoon, warm lighting, creek or small river passing through bottom of the frame.
Rockville Notch, Nova Scotia, 1961
Large wide landscape shot from the lookoff near Minas Basin in Nova Scotia. Taken in 1961. Shows road at bottom of the frame with a white car parked to the side of the road next to steep hill. Body of water in the distance. Mid afternoon, sunny day.
Minas Basin from Lookoff, Nova Scotia, 1961
Photo of Halifax Harbour in 1961. Taken on a sunny day in the spring or summer months. Vantage shows buildings below along river and harbour. Bridge crossing river in the background.
Halifax Harbour and Angus Macdonald Bridge from Citadel HIll, Nova Scotia, 1961

I’m also in the process of scanning my Dad’s large transparency collection dating, mostly, from the 1970s. We discovered them not to long ago. He thought he had lost them forever!

Photo of boxed slides, many Kodachrome.
My dads recently found slide collection.

Also, really hoping my long thought-about old-London-photo blog idea comes to fruition, but I’m not holding my breath, mainly because of practicality and time..

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