About
The Grand Father Project started with the intent of conserving the nearly 1000 (est.) glass plate negatives living in the family home in Trinidad, Colorado. Fortunately there was quite a lot of information available on-line for cleaning, repairing and storing glass plates. I acquired the necessary archival boxes and four flap envelopes, gallons of 99% isopropyl (good for making sanitizer too), distilled water and enough Kodak Photo-Flo to last a few lifetimes. Those and an Epson flatbed scanner.
Scanned to a resolution of 2160 pixels per inch and 16 bit color, the 4X5 Tif images are close to half a gigabyte in size. The 5X7 images are nearly a whole Gigabyte. These are B&W, why would I scan then in color? I'm hoping someday the color information might help correct blemishes and stains which leave a shadow effect on the final image. I keep two copies of each image on my computer, the unmolested scan of the negative, and a copy inverted to a positive image which I edit in Adobe Photoshop and catalog in Lightroom Classic. The actual processing is now much simpler than the first few I developed. It used to take me 2-4 hrs to fix the dust and scratches (dust is often embedded in the emulsion). I can now fix the dust and scratches in a few minutes using new software. The rest of the development is mostly setting the tonal range and checking for shadow detail.
Soon I'll have many nice neat orderly boxes of glass plates on a shelf in my basement. I'll also have a terabyte or so of images from those on my computer. Since there is no practical way to email images as large as these, the only practical solution was to create this website. The big downside is you don't get to see the full detail in the image. The JPG images on this site are only about 230KB as opposed to the 500GB of the original .tif file. These are suitable for email and social platforms. The big upside is everyone gets to see them and help contribute to identifying people places and things.
Technically there are no copyrights on grandfathers photographs. His copyright expired in 2002, 70 years after his death. There may be possibilities for some form of derivative copyright but I'm not perusing that route at this time. I tried to prepare these as an accurate reflection of his work. At first I thought to crop defective areas and do more for the cosmetics by choosing my own composition from within the picture. In the end I decided I would include the whole plate and present these as he took them.
Please enjoy these as much as I am.
Bruce Bell