Whenever I find old photographs of family members, I try to get those into my Lightroom database.  (Of course, this also works in Aperture, Bridge, or any other database program you may use.)  You don’t want to lose these old photos of your heritage, so bring them into your files and back them up the same as your current photostream.  You can find more about entering your ancestors’ information in a blog I wrote back in 2010 (here).

I know I’m using a pretty broad definition of people photography by including these old folks, and you and I didn’t take these photos.  However, I feel strongly that you should save your old photos.  Too many cherished memories just gather dust until they get tossed out in the next spring cleaning.

These old gems are a good place to begin learning how to  restore photos.  Black and white photos relieve you of the burden of color restoration at the same time you’re trying to learn to repair tears and folds.  You can remove stains and color shifts by removing all the colors.  After you have made the restorations, you can add in a sepia or selenium tone to the repaired photo.  Mark gave you a good demonstration of some restoration work back at the beginning of our blog (here).

Let me close out by entreating you to find and save these old photographs.   The files won’t take up too much space on your drives, and, once you’ve brought them back to life, everyone will want a copy.  They are part of the world of people photography, and they are fun to fix up.

If you’ve never been to a Medieval Times, they serve you a meal at tables that surround a small arena.  You are treated to a performance, set during the time of kings and queens, princes and princesses.  There is a loose story line surrounded by jousting, trained horses and falcons, and sword play.  Each section cheers for a different knight during the games; we had the yellow knight.   He was one of the good guys.

Unless you have a special invitation to photograph the show, you’re going to have to deal with the limitations, and there were quite a few.  You can’t use flash, so that means increasing your ISO as high as you can before the noise level becomes unbearable.  Even then you probably need to use slow shutter speeds to get enough light.  We had seats on the front row, which gave me something to brace against for a good steady hold.  I put on my fast zoom because I didn’t have room or time to change lenses.  All this meant I was going to miss some of the action shots – and I did.  You can see I had the right moment, but the shutter speeds were just to slow to capture the fast action.

The lights are constantly changing in color and intensity.  To get consistent exposures, I switched to manual mode and locked in my color balance setting.  When you’re shooting through theater lighting that changes frequently, the camera will react to the changes and try to change exposure values – manual mode eliminates that problem.  Find your best exposure; set it in manual mode; and you’ll get better photos.  If you’re shooting in RAW, locking your color balance will make your processing much easier when your shooting light changes with the mood of the storyline.

You can’t move around, and that means all your photos will have the same point of view.  The place was full for our show, so I probably couldn’t have moved much any way.  During the jousting, they lower a safety net to ensure the audience isn’t hit with debris from the lances, so that interfered with several photos.  The mesh was too small for me to poke my zoom through it, and I didn’t want to end up in the dungeon so I let those shots go.

Though I’ve discussed the challenges you’ll encounter when you try to photograph the show, our staff was very friendly.  You can take your camera without worrying about whether they’ll allow you shoot.  Even the waiter was careful not to get in my way as he was bringing food and drink.  I will bring my camera the next time we go, and we have another grandkid birthday in April, so our next trip might be right around the corner.

The kids loved being so close to the show.  The yellow knight posed with them afterwards for photos.  One whispered, “He was really nice, but a little old.”  Yeah, the poor guy must have been 32….

Before the show, they have plenty of areas where you can pose the baseboard banshees for photos.  They even have adult beverages to reward the old folks for bringing the kids to the show.   We had a special treat for the birthday girl: she was “knighted” by the king.  (No, I didn’t tell her that girls were not knighted in those days.)  She was thrilled, and the night was a success.  I keep telling you that photography is supposed to be fun….

I just got back from Alaska, and it was cold!  It was -48 when we stepped off the plane.  I had lots of plans for the trip.  They didn’t pan out.

Why would anyone go to Fairbanks in January?  I really wanted to get some shots of the aurora borealis.  I’ve seen the northern lights many times when we lived in Alaska, but I never had a camera with me in those days.  You need a nice clear night, a night without ice fog.  I hoped  to get lucky while we were there.

The ice fog obliterated the sky for five of our seven nights; the other two, the lights weren’t out.  Yes, I’m quite aware that a big solar storm lit up the night sky right after we left.  Like I said, my plans didn’t pan out.  Here is the ice fog thinning out at 3:30 pm one day.  Notice how low the sun is?  We got less than five hours of daylight each day.

The real reason to travel north in the middle of winter was the arrival of our most recent grandchild.  We scheduled our trip two weeks after the due date, but he decided to come a couple of days after we arrived.  We just hung around the house and waited with the dogs.

When he finally arrived home, I just took a few snapshots and held the boy (when I could get him away from my wife).  It was a wonderful, relaxing week with the family, which just grew by one more.  Doesn’t get better than that.

The boy goes by the nickname of Dodge.  I may sprinkle some shots of him into the blog now and then.  We sure were glad to see him.

Our plans to get home didn’t pan out, either.  But the re-routed flights and misplaced bags came with a silver lining – airline dollars to return in the spring when the weather will be warmer and the boy crawling.  Anyone want to travel north in May?  It’ll be fun….

The beginning of the trip was for family history purposes.  My mother wanted some photos of places she lived when she left Wisconsin.  New London, CT, had changed quite a bit, but we found a couple of the houses, including the one I spent my first months in.  It isn’t a special image, but, since the genealogy programs of today allow you to import photos, it will find a purpose.

The photo theme of the trip became buildings.

As you can tell from the image, the clouds were gray and low.  If you get into this situation, you want to minimize the amounts of sky included in the photo.  This can be a good time to focus on parts of the building you find interesting.

We moved up the coast to Cape Cod for a couple of days.  The Cape has lots of scenery to keep a camera busy and mine was.  I enjoyed both sunrises and sunsets, and the good thing about Cape Cod is you catch both with beautiful water scenes.  We found one of the famous beach houses facing due East towards Martha’s Vineyard.  A small spit of land allowed me to catch a shot without getting wet.

One evening, I was out by Yarmouth as the sun was setting.  There are lots of small inlets that shelter the boats.  The warm light from the golden hour gave the scene a great look.  The photo may seem cliché to some, but I really like this one since it captured the light the way I saw it.

Of course, when we got up to Boston, my buildings theme got more difficult.  Those are some big buildings!  How do you capture those?  Skylines are always nice.  You can take vertical panoramas, like the church I posted in Tuesday’s blog.  Or just shoot part of the building….how about a photo of a building, reflected in another building?

All in all, it was a good workout for me.  We had a great time, and I got lots of buildings.  Of course, that isn’t the only subject my camera found.  I ended up with hundreds of photos that weren’t buildings, including this cute, little girl having fun on her trike.  You need to get out there, too.

My whole life I was moving because my father was in the Navy, and I was in the Army, so I don’t have a photo of a favorite place that I can get to easily.  I decided to create a composite image from more current photos.  You can do the same.

I started with a picture of the house.  It was just a little too colorful, so I lowered the saturation a bit in the final composite.  I quickly realized that I needed to crop the image or the photograph in my hand would be too small when I aligned it with the background image.  The best crop also dictated a change from landscape format to portrait format.

I originally had my hand in the house photo, but I didn’t like the image as much as the one with my hand as the focal point.  That meant I had another photo to work into the final image.

And, finally, I needed a photo of some very cute children.  Where would I find that?  Well, Mark says I’m not happy unless I throw in a shot of a family member into the blog every couple of months, so I grabbed a shot of the grandchildren just to allow him to be proven right. 

I have the shots; now we need to open up Photoshop and get to work.

Since the house photo would be the background and the largest portion of the finished image, that was my base image.  I reduced the saturation of the layer, dulling the colors to make it look older and so they wouldn’t be as bright as the photo in my hand.

I opened the image of the hand as a layer on top of the base layer.  I only needed the hand, so I masked out the rest of the photo.

The final layer was the photo of the kids.  I used the Free Transform tool to shrink the image to appear like it was a photo in my hand.  I made sure that layer was fully saturated.  I aligned the photo to the bushes and the porch pole as you see being done in the other dearphotograph images.  I also put a white border around the kids’ “photo” to make it stand out better from the background.  When I put the kids in place (top layer) where it needed to be, it obscured part of my thumb and fingers.  I masked part of the kids’ photo, so the thumb underneath came through and created the illusion that I was holding the photo.  And the image was done.

All that is required is a sentimental caption to finish it off.

"The day is brighter and more colorful when grandchildren visit."

It was a fun little project.  If you have Photoshop, Elements, or a similar program, you can do this without too much fuss.  Keep having fun with your photography.