At 5:34 PM -0700 3/30/07, Marilyn Dalrymple wrote:
Why hard copy?
Last year when I got my all-in-one I thought I'd give it a try, the
flatbed part, that is.
So I dug into a drawer that has my family's pictures in it and
brought out a badly beat up image of my grandfather sitting on a
bench on a carriage with a whip in his hand and two horses in front -
and my father sitting in his lap. In the carriage sat my grandmother
with my Aunt Helen, a mere newborn, in her lap - long white
christening dress and bonnet.
The photo was taken in Bucharest before my grandparents emigrated to America.
The scanner did a fabulous job, I fixed the places where the emulsion
had scraped off - reconstructed half an elbow in a jacket, cleaned up
all the accumulated dirt - all that good dutiful stuff. Resisted the
temptation to jack up the contrast, too!
And printed it out on glossy and watercolor a couple times. It was
nice. It was actually pretty good, if I say so myself.
But I put the prints away in one of my collection albums and never
look at them. They're there, the big fat scanned image is on a DVD
somewhere too.
But every once in a while I open the drawer again, look at the 105
year old photograph and think about those people, the choices they
made, their failures, the fates they chose, their children who I knew
as my elders, their deep and permanent influence on me.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/
