Photographs

Images that store or spark memories, and what to do about them.

Wordless Wednesday, 5 years after 05/05/05 Family Reunion Edition

¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Click the big wide photo to enlarge.
Photo taken by camera timer. But it was my camera.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Personal History • Photographs
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A shoebox of photos

(This is in memory of Steve, and is for Debbi) His sister looked through the shoebox of photos. “Wow! I’ve never seen these before!” Sister and Mom sat in chairs on the grass in the backyard. I sat in one of the group of chairs encircling the metal firepit. Together they paged through snapshots. His Mom held slides up to the afternoon sun.

“Dad’s hobby was photography,” Sister said. “Did you see this one? the one where he’s standing in front of that car? What kind of car is that?”

My boyfriend looks, and after a thoughtful pause, he says, “Cadillac.”

It’s a Cadillac with a long front end, maybe late 30s, early 40s. A car that you’d see at those classic car shows. The kind of car you’d wave to if you saw it barrelling along the freeway. The kind of car that brings a smile to your face in the year 2010.

“He’s always posed in front of cars,” Sister says. She and Mom look at the snapshots of toddlers in a tall tile bath. “Who is that with Steve?”

Mom looks, and says a name.

(Alas, I forgot the name. This is not my family, so the names don’t register as strongly.)

Steve, the one toddler in the bath, just died.... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Memorabilia • Photographs
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MemoryMiner 2.0 is out!

MemoryMiner 2.0. Cool. Been looking forward to this, and readers of this site’s comment threads have had a slight heads up this was coming. The announcement arrived as I was out of town for the holiday. MemoryMiner’s developer, John Fox, is the digital family photo Santa. I came up with a wishlist of items while working with the till-now current version, will have to download it and check out the new version.

UPDATE: I’ve been taking a look at the demo movie, and I like the things I see in there so much that I’m putting the movie here, too.

Thought this movie is for the Mac version, MemoryMiner is cross-platform. Looks as though, at this point, MemoryMiner 2.0 is Mac-only at this point. I’ll get you more news about any plans for MemoryMiner 2.0 for Windows.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Digital Storytelling • Personal History • Photographs
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Genealogy Jamboree in Burbank (June 2009)

Memories of Jamboree, Burbank, California, from June of this year. Image: Footnotes at Jamboree. What fun it was to meet fellow Geneabloggers and hang out. I think I spent more time hanging and talking than I did going to the conference sessions at Jamboree.

The above footnote image, and this grassy... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Genealogy • Photographs
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MIT class of 1920: A gift in my email

This image is a gift, one I received in an email. My cousin sent it to me a couple of weeks back. Subject line: “Grandma Joe* Graduation Photo.” She went to MIT — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and graduated in 1920.

I have Grandma’s letters that she received when she was at MIT, and one or two photos from that time, but this unexpected one is a beaut.

click to enlarge

Of the 40 people in this photo, Florence, also known as Flossie (upper right)—is the only woman. The photo arrived in email all by itself. The only clues were the file name and the subject line. Other than knowing that Flossie graduated from MIT in 1920, I don’t know much else about this photo. But one good gift leads to another.

I went hunting to see what I could find about the size of the graduating class. MIT Archives to the rescue! The MIT Reports to the President—with reports of student enrollment—extends back nearly 100 years (earliest online version: 1911). To find out about 1920, I looked at the 1921 report (for end of 1920, published at the beginning of 1921).... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Letters in the Attic • Personal History • Photographs
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Dad Memorial Scanfest, part 2: How we used the images

My Dad’s memorial was filled with photos, dear reader. Filled with them. The memorial was a little over a week ago. Here’s what went down. Here’s what we did with the photos I scanned (as described in Part 1). (I’ll write one more post about lessons learned on a personal level)

The basic workflow of the images was: Scanning app → Photoshop where I did some basic color correction. When I scan images, I make them as big as possible, huuuuge file sizes. The scanner gave me the option of saving as TIFFs, so I did that. Before I brought them into MemoryMiner, I did a batch process in Photoshop to reduce the image size to half of what it was before, which left enough pixels for anyone who wanted to print out a high-ish resolution photo (longer dimensions average somewhere above 1200 pixels.) I changed foto format to high resolution JPEGs because I’m planning on eventually distributing the photo library, and I want it all to fit on a single DVD (capacity 4.7 GB)

I imported the half-size jpegs into MemoryMiner, and IDd the people in the photos and assigned them dates and locations. We had a large and thorough collection... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Personal • Photographs
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The Dad Memorial Scanfest Marathon

I’ve been on a tear, scanning family photos, for Dad’s memorial — the printed program, slideshow, and to burn on CD to share among extended family. I wrote most of this post when I was near the end of Marathon session #2, over the Hallowe’en/All Saints weekend a week+ ago. Find the album, pull out the fotos, scan at super high resolution. Open Photoshop to crop and/or copy paste just the individual image into its own image file. All of this has me thinking about the best way to share and manage a huge photo collection. This is one of those “thinking out loud” post, most composed 10 days ago, with some follow-up comments from today.

It’s been a month since Dad died, and the memorial is set for this weekend. This has allowed us some time to breathe, and to give family members time to plan a trip here for Dad’s memorial. It’ll be a Great Gathering. The scanfest(s) are to prepare for it.

Even though Dad’s memorial is a week and a half away, at 2 weeks out I felt the tug of this scanfest project drawing to a close. It could go on forever. Seriously. There are so. many. more. pictures. (And slides. So many slides!)

But there are other things to do. These photos need to be resized from gargantuan full-resolution .tif  or .psd file to high-rez jpegs, then brought into MemoryMiner. Where I identify who-where-when for each photo. (Importing and cataloging over 200 pictures is too much to do in a stretch, so I’ve been taking it in batches)

Being a graphic... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Personal • Photographs
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Playing with MemoryMiner export

MemoryMiner and exporting. I’m figuring out how to export a library and then transfer that to my laptop, so that I can show you MemoryMiner if you’ll be at the SoCal Genealogical Jamboree (Twitter hashtag #scgs09) this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The app is available on both Mac and Windows; I’ve got the Mac version, of course/ The export process isn’t the most obvious, so I’m writing about how I will accomplish it.

How I will... notice the future tense. This is still a work in progress.

The photo library dates back some time, and individual photos reside all over the frickin’ place on my computer—some in iPhoto libraries, some in folders each of which representing different scanning session, the most recent of which was an ego-scan session to compile a set of photos of myself for a birthday party invite. The photos themselves are pretty large, if they’re PSD (photoshop) files, because I scan them at fairly high rez. Many photos are over 20MB in file size. The largest, I think, is around 60 MB.

I decided to work with an external disk drive (easy to change from my main desktop computer to my laptop, and there’s extra space on it, too.)

Part 1: The false start (or, what not to do)

Under the file menu of MemoryMiner 1.86 (MacOS), there are a... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Family History Software • How-To • Personal History • Photographs
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Photography changes what we remember

This 3.5 minute video (direct YouTube link; embedded below) is an interview with Hugh Talman, a photographer with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He muses on his act of photographing the aftermath of Katrina. The curator who was planning to visit the area asked him, “What would you photograph?” His reply: “you’d photograph the evidence of the power of Katrina. I don’t style myself as photojournalist, but it turned into having photojournalistic aspects to it.” The video shows some of his photos. Most striking: photographs of an object where it was found (in its full post-Katrina context), versus the object photographed the way Talman normally works with objects, shot in the sanitized setting of a photo studio. What a contrast.

Before I watched the video (and saw just its name—“changes what we remember”), I thought, “Oh, this might relate to photos and memories and how to use photos to nudge or direct memories.” Not so pointed as that. It’s more that a collection of photographs is a kind of memory artifact of how it was. The contrast between an object’s plain (studio) background versus that object in its environment so powerfully conveys the power of Katrina. The two photos of the same object may as well be two different objects. I’m inspired to hunt more carefully when I look at old photographs for objects and their contexts, and the clues they might provide about a person or a time. I’m thinking primarily about old family albums, but the same approach can be applied to any historical photograph collection.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Interviewing • Photographs
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Wordless Wednesday: Doris rides Pete

Click to enlarge

Great Aunt Doris atop her horse, Pete. Found in letters among Christmas Cards. She hand colored this herself. More photos of Doris
Wordless Wednesday

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Personal History • Photographs
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LIFE magazine photo archive now searchable on Google

LIFE photo archive hosted on the web by Google. Photos go back to the 1860s, and sketches & etchings go back to the 1750s. Wow! Here’s the Google blog post about it. There goes the afternoon. I’ve already found an interesting railroad set. There goes the afternoon! [via Lifehacker]

Not only is this cool, but it’s a good thing to poke through if you’re going to sit down and interview someone. It’s better to get some research in about the time and place where your interviewee lived. What was it like in 1950s? What about such-n-such events? Spending time in collections such as this helps to take you, the questioner, there, and ask better questions of your interviewee.. I’ve been thinking about online repositories of supporting information

P.S. Southern Pacific Rail Road. Dispatcher, perhaps? That was my grandfather’s job and employer

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Interviewing • Photographs
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She Went West and Climbed Mt. Rainier

In 1924, the 23-year-old woman climbed Mt. Rainier in Washington State. Edith kept a photo album, and wrote captions in white ink. She called herself Edy. I previously blogged about her mother, Jenny, whose childhood was marked by over-protection: Jenny’s parents hovered over her, and protected her so much that she felt stifled. That’s what parents do to the remaining child when the elder son leaves to seek his fortune and is never heard from again. Jenny wouldn’t let her daughter’s dreams be stifled the way she herself was stifled. So when Edy announced she wanted to go west, Mom told her daughter, “Go, go.” And Go she did. Including climbing to the top of a volcano.

The album is a record of Edy’s western sojourn. She worked at a Veterans Hospital. There’s a photo of Edy in uniform standing behind a man in a wheelchair. Lots of pictures of friends, of cars, picnics. Photos of a horse (“Chief”)  When I first paged through this album, though, I was amazed at these 8 pages of photos of her trek to climb Mt. Rainier. It takes a lot of pluck and stamina to make a climb like that.

The Mt. Rainier National Park web site describes the climb:

Mount Rainier, the most heavily glaciated peak in the contiguous United States, offers an exciting challenge to the mountaineer. Each year thousands of people successfully climb this 14,410 foot active volcano. .... Reaching the summit requires a vertical elevation gain of more than 9,000 feet over a distance of eight or more miles. Climbers must be in good physical condition and... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Personal History • Photographs
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Shades of the Departed Guest Blog

Hooray for Footnote Maven, who invited me to guest blog at Shades of the Departed. My post is about interviewing people about photo albums. Why photos rock, and what sorts of practical things you can do during an interview. You may already be a winner! Read the entry to find out why. (I certainly won-in a slightly different way. Thanks to fM for the nudge to write that post. If it weren’t for that deadline, I might’ve waited a little while longer before blogging here again.)

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Personal History • Photographs
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Collective Intelligence

Library of Congress uploads 3000 photos from its archives to Flickr for all the world to tag.

I whiled away a bit of time last night adding tags to photos. At first, I thought, Oh, there’s nothing to add. But then I discovered that there were tags I could add. (in the process, I discovered that there are two ways to spell bandolier/bandoleer, the criss-cross belt worn on the torso that holds ammunition. Who knew?)

I’d love to see more tags added by those who know fashions and can name the style of jacket, or hat. I mean sombrero and bowler I know, but what about the type of caps worn by boys in 1910, or the style of jacket lapels or decorations on a woman’s dress? And tho I found much to admire in outfits worn by people, I certainly didn’t want to add stylin’ as a tag.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Photographs
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Holiday visits: Witness to an Interview

Photo albums are a thing of beauty. I got to witness an oral history interview about a photo album on my Christmas holiday travels. I was the silent third party, operating the equipment, and asking the occasional question to pull out a few more details. Son brings Father a photo album, put together by Son’s Mother. The album was discovered after Mother’s death. It covers the time in Mother’s and Father’s early life together, before the kids were born, and before the Mother and Father’s divorce. Father is the only one alive who can describe what’s going on in the photos. Here are a few observations I made about interviewing with photo albums.

Photos are a fabulous memory trigger. When sparking a conversation about someone’s recollections, how do you get to the well of memories inside a person’s mind? Questions may trigger… they are words to tap that well, but that recollection-well still resides inside the person’s mind. Pictures are external triggers. They bring back the memories for the interviewee. Plus, being external, the interviewer can make his or her own observations about what’s in the picture, and use them to elicit more information. “Tell me about the car” or “Look at the uniform you wore! When did you get that uniform?” or “Whose house is that?”

Interviewing over photo albums For The Record.  It’s wholly natural to speak in gestures. “Well, the whatchamacallit was about like so [gesture indicating size]” or “That’s her [pointing to one of several pictures on a page].” Both interviewer and interviewee understand the meaning, but that meaning needs... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Photographs
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