Mom Reading a Letter (Posterized and Rescued Snapshot)

Mom Reading a Letter (Posterized and Rescued Snapshot), a photo by randubnick on Flickr.

This image started with a old snapshot from a batch of photos that my aunt sent to me this past month. These pictures were all from my mother's old photo album, pictures taken of her as a young woman. Many of the pictures were before she met my dad and got married, and some were soon thereafter. And most of the photos I have never seen. Did she put the album away because there were a lot of pictures of her old boyfriends in there! Any, quite a treasure-trove. This morning I looked through them and found one that I really liked, of my mother sitting in a chair and reading a letter. There is no date on the back, so I don't know when it was taken. But in the forties, obviously, and in our old house in Pueblo, Colorado. Was the letter from my Dad? I like to think so, but she had other boyfriends, obvious from the pictures. Like many of these snapshots, the photo itself is about 2" x 3". I liked the composition. (I don't know who the photographer was, but I am guessing it was my aunt or my grandmother) but the photo was out of focus and it had scratches and marks on it. I wanted to rescue it, so I scanned it into my computer, did some basic retouching and cropping in iPhoto, and then opened the image in Painter. I sharpened the focus a bit and then added some color overlays and posterized by sections until I had what I wanted. I am doing this by way of marking my mother's birthday, which would have been today, November 2. My mother didn't have a clue that she was beautiful.