Category: Photo

Goode Family Slides 1950-1972

Greeting, mostly to the immediate Dave Goode family.  I’ve been busy scanning slides, some really old ones too!  Paula made selections from a much larger group and handed them off to me in March, 2014.  This represents about half of them.

The technology at work is an Epson V750 Pro scanner, mated to an iMac running Silverfast Ai 8.0.  This software is amazing and allows for the quality of the images herein.

It can’t be overstated how much these images are improved in the scanning process. Virtually every image that could be saved at all had from one to many serious issues.  All the slides were dirty and dusty. The really old slides were beyond that.  They are falling apart, are badly pitted. This is to be expected for 65 year old media.  The lifespan of a slide is rated at about 25 years.   They look like they’ve been shot through with fine grained buckshot.  75% of these slides overall were too dark.  The other 25% were too light.  Most slides have suffered from color shifts. Kodachrome slides especially can’t handle light and dark in the same shot.  Peoples faces often could not be seen in the gloom. Many slides were tipped to the side.

Different people were behind the camera for these shots.  Camera technology back in the day was somewhat crude (no autoexposure !), and our intrepid photographers were dealing with a stacked deck, not the least of which is that they didn’t get to see the results of their work for weeks, or months.  I have the advantage in my “lab” of immediate feedback.  Having said that, they all suffered from a a universal malaise called “aiming high”.   I can’t count the number of pictures that cut the subjects off at the waist, or the knees, while at the same time showing the vastness of the heavens. The poor people in the pictures are waving their arms and shouting “Hey!  We’re down here!”, while they cling to the bottom 20% of the frame.  The same type of shift often occurs to the left or the right as well.  People cut in half while most of the picture features a blank wall.

There wasn’t much to be done about this.  I often cropped away a great deal of the photo to give the appearance of centering the subjects.

The slides were given to me in a random pile.  Kudos to whoever wrote copious notes on the body of the slides.  It gave me something to work with in sorting them by year.  I’m sure mistakes were made.  In most cases I copied those notes to the “caption” underlying each picture.

Click on each year to see that gallery.

1950

1951

1952

1953

1954

1955

1958

1963

1964

1966

1968

1969

1970

1971

1973

1972

Big Metal Box

These retirement pictures were scrapped together by a variety of people, mostly Nancy, and shown on a slide projector at Dave’s retirement party from the Trane company.

Dave Goode Retirement Collage