When I went back East in to visit my mother in her final days, part of what I did was to go through her stuff. She had collected an amazing amount of mementos from all her years. There were a few boxes of negatives (remember those?). Now most people throw those out after a while, but not my mother. In sorting these negatives every so often I would find a few slides. I saved these slides, and when I got home, I put them into a slide tray and gave them a gander. I was amazed to see these images from early in my family's history, many from before I was born, and most I had never seen before. Pictures of Eleanor when she was tall and thin (@ 25 young!).

Some of the images were Kodachrome, which held their color very well, whereas the Ektachromes did not. (Kodachrome, a dye transfer process was on the market 1936, Ektachrome, the E6 process, came on the market 1946.) Many of these found slides had started to corrode and had layers of dust on them. I came up with a method to digitize them, which is to project them on the wall, and then take a shot with my Olympus electronic camera. I then took these and cleaned them up in Photoshop, eliminating dust and hairs, as well as bringing back a little color. I am amazed at how clean the images look now, although in some you can still see remittances of scratches & dust as well blue blotches from 50 years of chemical erosion.

I enjoyed this process of cleaning these images up as well as recounting the early years and some better moments of my family. There is something about these images, an innocence?, early color? I'm not sure, but I hope you enjoy them.

For comments and additions, email me at paul@paulrother.com