Digitalizing old photos

In the last weeks, I have spent some time digitalizing the best of my grandparents pictures.

In preparation, I did some online searches to this theme and was kind of overwhelmed by the effort most people put in. I did not want to build a complicated rig with the light just so or rent a special scanner. So I went into ´nobody needs perfection mode` and just started snapping away.

And you know what? The pictures came out pretty decent!  I especially love this small fat baby that is my great grandaunt sometime in the early 20th century! Now I can enlarge it, print, it, share it whenever I want. That was really worth the ( quite small) effort.

Pretty much the only thing I did was put the photo album on a window sill during good light and take a ton of pictures to get a decent one.


Once I had chosen the best of the bunch, I uploaded it to pixlr (a free photo editing programm) and did some corrections through cropping and the option of brightness and contrast and automatic color corrections.

There were some issues, mostly that sometimes the lense of the camera would reflect on the photo. But that did not happen too often and could be corrected through taking creative positions while shooting and some cropping where that did not work. 

My father was a staunch defender of the ´just use the regular scanner` approach but I did not want to rip the pictures out of their albums. Also, it seemed like more work. As I am the boss of my blog I will call that efficency, not laziness.



Here are some more favorites:  What do you think of my great grandmother with her big sis a little later?


             Or my Grandma, her brother and a friend being adorable at a trip in the heather?

                             
The digitalized pictures have a ton of advantages. The chances of the photos being damaged or lost are diminished, new copies can be made and I am going to create one new album that contains only the best instead of about ten that often repeat and are pretty much falling apart.

Have you digitalized any of your old pictures? What was your experience? Do you have any advice to share?