Spring City, Utah

This weekend I travelled to Spring City, Utah for the funeral of Kathleen, a great aunt, one of my grandfathers younger sisters.

Spring City was originally settled in 1852 by James Allred and his sons. The Wakara War caused the settlers to leave for Manti and they later returned in 1859 to resettle the area and call it Spring City.

Spring City is about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City and is now considered an artistic haven with lots of local art galleries and small private museums.

The stone church above was built in 1902 and the influence of the early Danish settlers can be seen in the architecture. The church faces almost due east and so the early morning sun provides beautiful natural light. The annex to the right is a later addition to the buildings original structure.

I used a wide angle lens and framed the church with tree branches. You can see early buds emerging on the trees. Based on your personal belief, the emerging "buds" could represent a "re-birth".

Scanning Old Photos

I came across this image in a bunch of my grandfathers things. The problem was that it was just a 4"x5" Black and White negative. It is important to me for two reasons. First, my grandfather loved the Indians. Second, I still have the headdress that he is wearing. When he met these fellows, they were very, very poor and were quickly losing their culture. He helped them make the headdresses that he and the chief are wearing. He also worked with them, teaching them how to make drums, one of which I still have.

Anyway, I wasn't sure what to do with the negative and how to get at least a reasonable image. I opened the regular scanner bed and set it directly on the glass. I then removed the white backing on the scanner so that the light used to illuminate negatives was exposed. I did not use the slide/negative carrier since the negative was too large (You'll note I could not get the entire negative, so I settled for the faces). I set it in place and then set the scan to "film" and "b&W". I used 600 dpi setting. HP has some nice tips for scanning at the following link:

http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/organize_archive_photos/tips/10_tips_scanning.html

When I got it, it was a little washed out, so I used Adobe CS2 and cropped it and then used "Auto Improve". It added some dense black to the image and for taking a couple of minutes and costing nothing is a pretty good option. Now that I have the image, I'll take the negative to a good pro Photo Shop like Inkleys.

By the way, these are "Shivwits" Indians from around St. George Utah. Grandpa has the moustache.

Grandma and Grandpa

Grandma and Grandpa's first apartment. The surprise was finding a description in my grandmothers handwriting on the back completing the story.

The Chart of Many Bubbles

Way back in 2002, when less than 10% of cameras sold were digital. I looked at what it would take to simplify the art of telling a story in multimedia. It seemed to me that multimedia would be an emerging opportunity. My main motivation was to find a way to allow people to "give voice" to their stories. I wanted to hear the stories of my friends and family in their own words. I wanted to know what made them who they were. Still images, video tapes and books did not seem like the answer. Over time, it became obvious that three things were necessary.

Individual Expertise

Probably the most difficult thing was to have an idea. What did you want to do? If you have never done something, how would you know what you could do? You also need motivation, and lots of it. Storytelling is a daunting task. You needed content and industry information showed that more than 1 trillion printed images were stored in shoe boxes and darkened closets. In many cases you knew something about the images (context) and in many cases you did not. For example, I found an image in an old album my Dad had stored in the garage. It appeared that my grandfather was in the image with my grandmother, but they were very young. I asked my Dad if that was grandpa and grandma, he said "no". I took the image out of the book and their in my grandmothers handwriting were the words "our first apartment". Case solved. You also needed artistic ability and technical competency. No wonder storytelling was a lost art.

Hardware

You needed digital cameras, personal computers, printers, video cameras, tape players, tape recorders, VHS, Beta, D3, Video Tape, Film etc. All these were the capture and create devices. With one device you would capture moments through images, video, sound and with others, you would publish those moments in a form that others (and yourself) could enjoy. Things like prints, movies, DVD's, CD's and anything you could think imagine.

Software

The interface between humans and machines is software. Software tells the machine what to do. Only problem is, software was (and is) designed by engineers. Engineers just love a challenge. So the more powerful the software, the harder is is to learn, use etc. Imagine needing to learn a new language in order to use a pair of scissors!


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