Tag Archives: photos

SNGF-Ways I’m Genealogically Lucky

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musing has posted the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, challenge for this week.
His instructions were as follows:

1) When have you had a dose of good genealogy luck? What document or resource did you find just by happenstance or chance? By being in the right place at the right time? By finding a family history treasure in your family’s attic or basement? By finding a helpful document or reference without even looking for it?

2) Tell us (Genea-Musing)about it in Comments to that post, in Comments on Facebook or Google Plus, or in a blog post of your own.

When my Grandfather passed away, and the estate was being divided, I let a cousin take many of the hard copy photos home. At that point in time I wasn’t really working on my Dad’s family, but rather working on my husbands genealogy. I knew Dave was doing my Dad’s side of the family and would take care of them.

About a year after that, my sister said, you know I have a few boxes in the garage that Aunt Jenny put together for Dad. Well, I hi-jacked it. Dad has never really seemed to have  a working interest in his history. There were many wonderful things in it, which I will most likely write about in the future.

I have recently gone through the box again and found a bunch of photos, and to top it off I found some old negatives.  These negatives have turned into a wonderful find. Many of them are taken in the 1930’s and include pictures of my Great Grandparents their children, spouses, and some of their grandchildren!  Some of these people I probably met at one time or another, but I don’t recall them and I surely wouldn’t remember them at this time of their lives!  I am developing them in batches and posting them on shutterfly to share with family and to get names on them. I don’t how much luckier one can get.

Happy Hunting!

 

Tuesday Tip-On scanning black and white photos

AH! Ha!

There are tips you learn before you try your hand at a task, there are others that jump out at you when you believe you are doing everything just right.

Well tonight’s tip comes from learning the hard way. I am just thankful I only scanned 20 photos and not a much larger number.

I am chugging along, remembering that I have seen that one should save photos in TIFF and at least a 300 DPI resolution if not more for archives. Scanner set for TIFF check, set at 600 DPI check, and set to black and white check! After all the photos I am scanning are black and white. What could go wrong, nothing this should be a breeze. Scanner is working quickly and it’s not taking all night. (that should have been a clue)

Pictures are all now scanned, and I am now cropping the photos. They look good in the thumbnails but when I open them up bigger they sure don’t look right, they are very grainy and and full of shadows! What the heck did I do! I know some of you are already chuckling, silly silly girl. These photos should be very fine, but they aren’t (scratching head)

This was scanned on black and white, tiff and 600 dpi and converted to jpeg so I could upload it.

OH!!! the light goes on! The pictures are indeed black and white, but in black and white photography there are nuances that scanning in black and white does not catch, it literally turns the photos black and white no in between colors. Now that I have figured that out and I am now scanning again, and in the mean time I have written this while re-scanning the photos.

This is scanned in color, tiff and 600 dpi, converted to jpeg so that I could upload it.

The settings that I am now using are color, TIFF and 600 DPI. I am much happier with these results! Maybe with the next batch of black and white photos  I will try gray scale. Never know what I might get it always helps to know how things turn out in other formats, a process that I might be able to use in other aspects of photographic work.

Now to upload the rest of the pictures to Ogilvie Family Photos so that I can share them with my family.

Happy Scanning!