Old travel and family photos

A scanned image from a photo taken on a diving trip in Australia

If you are like me and have a growing number of grey hairs, you will also most likely have a collection of old family and/or travel photos or slides which you took before the digital era. My wife (Marie) and I are keen photographers and we started off in the good old days when photography was still an art. When you used film or slides, had one or two photos which you could shoot on a good sighting. You also had to make sure all of your settings on the camera were correct and you only saw the results a week or so after the trip! Boy, how things have changed. Today, the cel phones have better cameras in then our first SLR cameras! There is also so much software today for the modification of photos. Yes, some of this software can give you a really great looking photo, but the photos are becoming unnatural. This is a major problem with wildlife photography. The animal (or plant) did not look like that when you took the photo. Anyway - I digress. I have had my rant about over processing of digital photos. In the "good old days" (man I am starting to sound really old) of slide photography, you had to take the perfect photo, not make it afterwards. The problem with slides, however, is that to look at them, you have to have a slide projector, which you need to set up and then you all settle down to look at the slides. I must say, we have not looked at out slide collections for at least 6 years now. They are all stored in many boxes, taking up valuable storage space. So what is the point of having them? Many of our overseas trips are recorded in the many thousands of slides which we have. Some of my trips are even on photographs which, by now, are starting to fade a bit.Then there is all of the boxes of old family photos. What is the point of having these photos if no-one ever looks at them. When my late mother and father passed away, I also got the boxes of their old photos, like their wedding photos from 1948! My late dad served with the South Africans in North Africa during World War two. Another amazing set of photos which are stuck in boxes in the cupboard.

This is an old photo of my Dad and his sister taken who knows when. Now it is digital and the world can see it!

My Dad in Egypt in 1943 during the 2nd World War

So what to do? Make them digital, of course and shear on social media. Put them in the cloud and give selected people access to these photos. Share the photos on Google photos. This is all great, but you have to get the photos digital. 

Another old photo which was just gathering dust in a box.

As I have already mentioned, cel phones today have really great camera  in. It is not very difficult to take a good photo of a photo using your cel phone. This I have done often. The problem is that you need to spend some time on post capture processing. The most important and most needed post capture processing is to crop the photos. Normally with the typical cel phone photo there is some background in the image of the photo. Sometimes you need to hold the camera a bit too high to get the photo in focus. You then also have the table or whatever else you are putting the photo on in your digitalised image. Once you start with the post capture processing, even the more basic cel phones have some photo editing software included. So you spend some time optimising the colour, lighting and so on. This is great fun to start with, but when you facing a few thousand photos you want to work through, this post capture processing just starts taking too long.

I have discovered a great app for your phone to help with all of this. The app is called "Photomyne". It is designed to scan photos. The cropping of the photo is done automatically. So is the optimisation of the photo, so within about 5 seconds, you have the cropped, optimised photo ready for you. There is an option to record any wording on the photo, or for you to add a description to the photo. Another very nice feature of the app is that you can colourise a Black and white photo. This is all the rage at the moment with many of the old World War 1 images getting a colourising treatment. This does take quite some time on the App, so do not even think of trying to colourise hundreds of old Black and White images unless you are planning this as a major project.

This photo was taken in 1977 - long before anyone had thought of digital photography!

Once you have you images, I have set up a closed group of family members on Facebook and I share the photos there. The people are really enjoying it and some of them have also started to add some of their old family photos onto the group. A really great way to keep and share old photos!  

A colourised image of my parents wedding day in 1948!