3 Quarters Today

My Life, my photography, my passions

photo restoration

A Business Card Makes if Official

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So if a business card makes your business official, then I guess I’ve taken the leap. I’m not changing jobs, I love working at Hamilton Color Lab, but I am filling in some of the gaps in the cash flow side while supporting and partnering with my place of employment.

3 Quarters Images business cardOur primary business at Hamilton is professional printing for photographers and commercial graphics for trade shows and displays. When we have time we will edit images and do graphic design, but it’s not our core business. That’s where I can help in the “off hours”.

The same is true of scanning and restoration. Hamilton Color Lab specializes in museum quality scanning and large format reproductions. Often customers call and have many photos they want scanned and digitized, upwards in the hundreds. While the Eversmart scanner at work is amazing in it’s clarity and density reading it’s overkill, and expensive,  for someone who just wants digital images to share or wants to print a 4×6.

I love the post production side, as anyone reading this blog can tell. So this Saturday, November 24th,  I’m setting up a table at the Holiday Extravaganza Craft show in Elmwood Nebraska.

I will be offering the following services and products:

  • Photo Cards (area photographs, including “The Barn”)
  • Senior Photo printing (die-cut rounded corner wallets)
  • Photo Restoration
  • Shoebox Scanning
  • Professional Printing (through Hamilton Color, bring your USB, CD etc)
  • Collage Wall Designs
  • Galery Wrapped Photo Canvas
  • Decorative Wall Groupings
  • Christmas card designs
  • Graduation announcement
  • Senior Collages
  • How to turn your photos into art

If the initial response has been any indication of success this might just work. I have had two jobs and two people set up a meeting with me next week for a canvas layout, just by announcing this on my personal Facebook page.

Have a project in mind? Send me a message, or drop me an email.

Photo Restoration: 1960’s Era

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Photo Restoration 1960s
Photo Restoration 1960s

I’ve finally removed hundreds of old photos from nearly a dozen “magnetic” glue photo albums. Not quite acid free. My Mother thought she was doing a good thing in the 1980’s by organizing and putting them into albums, when in actuality they would have been better off in the desk drawer in the original envelopes.

There aren’t many photos of me when I was little, so I want to preserve what few photographs I have of my childhood. They were so stuck I had to use the pointy end of a fondue fork to pry them off and carefully unstick the back. The paper came off on some, but at least now the family memories are back in a shoebox, in a cool dark location in the closet so I can start on the photo restoration part of the project..

At first glance the photos look to be in pretty good shape, but it only takes one scan and a white correction on levels to see how far these photos have faded. I am using Photoshop to adjust the color and white balance to bring back the vibrancy. The white border is the perfect point to select in either layer curves or adjustment levels.

I have just started scanning the snapshots, but the really old photos from the late 1800’s and early 1990’s I’m going to have professionally scanned at Hamilton Color Lab, where I work, they do professional photo restoration. My home scanner will only capture so much detail and they are too important to trust to a Best Buy over the counter scanner.

Photo Story: Here I met my brother for the first time. We were both adopted through Children’s Services of Connecticut. As you can see, although my brother Lance was a baby, he wasn’t a newborn when he went to our parents. My birthday is Sept. 21, 1965, yet I didn’t go to my adoptive parents until January 20, 1966.  Along with photos I now have my adoption records, certificates, and letters from the agency. Still don’t know if I will search or not. Even after witnessing my husband and his son’s adoption reunion.

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