UNDATED – A young lady poses with a child for the photographer. Scan & editing © by Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com
The story behind the image
Every once in a while I share photos from our family archive. Here’s an undated photo of a beautiful young lady with a child as she poses for the photographer. I believe that the photographer – a distant relative of Petra – wanted to explore the technique, so one might call him an early ‘amateur photographer’. Clearly, he knew how to compose a good image, but lacked skills in the areas of exposure and development.
Like other prints from this specific section of the archive, it is in a horrible condition (see color calibrated scan below.) It has faded a lot and carries countless spots of all sizes – almost like heavy snow – and massive scratches all over the image, including the faces and clothes. Everywhere! The exposure was just okay, but the print has aged. What’s more – it is tiny: just about 3.7 x 5.5 cm. Scanned at 2400 dpi this provided 18 Megapixel for editing, but its true resolution was obviously much lower. In short: this image was a real challenge.
I tried to restored the image to come as closely as possible to the (perceived) intent of the photographer and applied a modern 2:3 crop. Today, it’s a 10.8 Megapixel image that can hopefully survive the next centuries, on some server. (Of course, 10.8 megapixels is still exaggerated, but maybe there will be new techniques in the future that can improve the image further.)
In case you are wondering how the print looked before the editing, i.e. today – here’s the calibrated scan:
The high resolution image
| Capture Date | undated, c. 1910 |
| Image Source | 3.7 x 5.5 cm black & white print |
| Digital Image Source | EPSON Perfection 4870 Photo |
| Digital Image Source Format | TIFF, 48 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Format | JPEG, 24 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Dimensions | 2685 x 4028 Pixels |
| Copyright | Scan © by Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com |
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