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My mom has recently begun the tremendously time consuming project of digitally organizing all of our family photos. This is quite an undertaking, as she is scanning slides and photos, sorting events, identifying and labeling family members, uploading to Flickr and adding images to her family tree on Ancestry.com. There are literally thousands of images to be sorted through, but, I gotta tell you, it is so worth the hard work. Once the photos are up on Flickr they can be shared with family members and also played as slideshows on TV using AppleTV. It is really cool.
I adore looking at old photos of family. Always have. There is something quite magical about it all. And now that the photos are digital, and not just hiding in dusty old boxes anymore, it's as if each person who is no longer with us has been brought back to life.
Some of my favorite photos are the ones that are hand colored. The hand coloring process was first used in the mid-1800s by various artists and painters in Europe and Japan. In the early to mid-1900s, hand colorization was widely popular among middle class families. Black and white photos were literally painted with a brush or finger using coloring materials such as watercolor and oil paints, crayon and pastels, and various natural and synthetic dyes. The end product became somewhat of a cross between a painted portrait and photograph, reflecting the colorists' artistic perspective.
Here are some of my favorites...
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| My grandmother on her wedding day. |
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| My grandmother (ca 1935) |
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| My mom. |
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| My mom again. (She was the first child. Lots of baby pics!) |
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| Mom |
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| Mom |
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| Mom |
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| Mom. One of my favorites. I think she looks like Natalie Wood here. |
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| Mom again. Ok - maybe a bit too much yellow on that dress... |
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| My mother's uncle. This pic is especially artistic with the wooded background. |
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| My mother's great uncle. |
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| Another one of my mother's uncles. |
Please feel free to share your favorite hand colored photos by linking to them in the comments. I'd love to see them.
Also, does anyone create the same effect using Photoshop or another photo editing software? Please share!
