Hello, and welcome to our very first blog entry! We’re Chris and Kathy, the owners of River Bend Photo Restoration. Check in with us every few days for news and thoughts on topics ranging from photo restoration to genealogy to just about everything else.
We have a lot of family photos. Our basement is full of albums which are full of old photographs. If there's one thing our relatives loved, it was taking pictures. A few of them are formal, posed studio photographs, but most of them are candid shots of family and friends. Those are my favorites. They capture everyday life, uninhibited. Family you never met, who may have died nearly a century ago, are seen as they were day to day. Putting a face with a name is one thing, but seeing your great-great-grandfather plowing a field or working on his tractor takes you to another place and time.
Our love of genealogy led to our love of old photos, and our old photos made us love genealogy even more. A couple of years ago I decided that our vast collection of family photos needed to be preserved. Some of them were over 120 years old! Although most of them had been very well cared for, some of them were showing signs of neglect (or perhaps too much love!). So I set about digitally scanning every single photograph I had. Little did I know at the time, but that meant scanning over TWELVE THOUSAND photographs. I told you my family liked to take pictures. It ended up taking 14 months, but eventually every single one of them was digitized and preserved.
Seeing the photos on the computer screen showed details I never could have seen with the naked eye. But along with that, the damage and imperfections in the photos were also made clearer. I set out to meticulously restore them, and was shocked by what a difference it made. Photos that were over a century old suddenly looked like they could have been taken recently. Suddenly, the photos jumped off the screen. They weren't just faded images, they were people. They had life again. Many of these photos are unique. Some may be the only photos ever taken of these people. Cleaning and repairing them, bringing their images back to life, was an uplifting experience. It honored people who might otherwise have been lost to time and forgotten. That is what makes this so satisfying. I want to be able to help others preserve the memories of their loved ones.
~Chris
We have a lot of family photos. Our basement is full of albums which are full of old photographs. If there's one thing our relatives loved, it was taking pictures. A few of them are formal, posed studio photographs, but most of them are candid shots of family and friends. Those are my favorites. They capture everyday life, uninhibited. Family you never met, who may have died nearly a century ago, are seen as they were day to day. Putting a face with a name is one thing, but seeing your great-great-grandfather plowing a field or working on his tractor takes you to another place and time.
Our love of genealogy led to our love of old photos, and our old photos made us love genealogy even more. A couple of years ago I decided that our vast collection of family photos needed to be preserved. Some of them were over 120 years old! Although most of them had been very well cared for, some of them were showing signs of neglect (or perhaps too much love!). So I set about digitally scanning every single photograph I had. Little did I know at the time, but that meant scanning over TWELVE THOUSAND photographs. I told you my family liked to take pictures. It ended up taking 14 months, but eventually every single one of them was digitized and preserved.
Seeing the photos on the computer screen showed details I never could have seen with the naked eye. But along with that, the damage and imperfections in the photos were also made clearer. I set out to meticulously restore them, and was shocked by what a difference it made. Photos that were over a century old suddenly looked like they could have been taken recently. Suddenly, the photos jumped off the screen. They weren't just faded images, they were people. They had life again. Many of these photos are unique. Some may be the only photos ever taken of these people. Cleaning and repairing them, bringing their images back to life, was an uplifting experience. It honored people who might otherwise have been lost to time and forgotten. That is what makes this so satisfying. I want to be able to help others preserve the memories of their loved ones.
~Chris
