Mom and Me (Digitally Restored Photo from Negative)

Mom and Me (Digitally Restored Photo from Negative)
Originally uploaded by randubnick

Today I wanted to make a Mother's Day image, so I was looking for a photo of my mother. She was camera-shy, so pictures of her are hard to find. I found an envelope of negatives of family photos taken by my uncle, Ike Fitterman. (My uncle had a photography studio in Pueblo, Jay Phillips Studio) In one of the negatives, I thought I saw an image of my mom holding me on her lap. I didn't think that I had ever seen a picture from this negative. Although I now plan to get this negative developed professionally, I was excited and wanted to see this today. I tried and failed to capture the negative image with a scanner; the result was too dark and I couldn't turn it into a good image no matter what I did with it afterward. Finally I had an idea. I slipped the negative under the edge of my computer screen, and then used my iPhone to photograph the back-lit negative. I got a clear image of the negative, which I e-mailed to myself, and downloaded. Then I opened the image in Painter, where I was able to produce a "negative" effect, and suddenly the positive image appeared! I did a little digital sharpening and cropped the image to get this composition. Then I transferred the result into iPhoto and made the image into a black and white photo. I was excited to see the photo that my uncle took, and here it is, cropped just a bit! I also used this image to create a piece of digital art which I plan to post here tomorrow, a collaboration with my Uncle Ike Fitterman.