Some of the images I’ve run through the flatbed scanner are complete works in and of themselves. They’re enlargements from actual photo shoots where I was attempting to be serious, rather than 1) sneaky, or 2) prurient. They would require very little in the way modification to get posted here,
except… they were printed on really obnoxious silk-like texture paper, and the texture shows up in the scans.
In this particular case, I used the
smudge stick filter in Photoshop Elements 5.0 to cover the silk texture, and added a border in ACDSee Pro. The image was also obviously cropped, and inverted from the original. The result is a more
hand-drawn appearance to the image, without going overboard.
Here are a couple more images that have pretty much been left alone. The interesting part here, is that these are scanned from 120 film
square negatives… in a 35mm film scanner. It was tricky, but I got it to work. The image on the left, was a candid taken of customers at the counter of the camera store I managed in the Seventies. I cropped out the surly boyfriend, (you
don’t want to see the original!), and used the Sepia tool in Picasa. That’s the extent of the changes. I was amazed how the
feel of the picture changed with just that little bit of modification!
The image on the right is of one of my oldest friends, (although I haven’t seen her in more than 10 years
).. we’ll call her
Suzie. She wanted a portrait for her husband at the time, and I was happy to oblige, being a perpetually broke college student at the time. I borrowed a friend’s apartment, gave Suzie my suede “hippie” hat and got to work. This is also a scan from a 120 black and white negative that I somehow shoved into the 35mm scanner. It was also given the sepia treatment, along with the soft focus tool.
There you have it. Not all old images have to be turned into weird and wacky abstract works. Sometimes they’re just fine the way they are.
