Computer, I salute you!

It may have come to your notice that I am rather keen on old photos.  

I suppose because all my grandparents (and most of my relatives) were in South America during my childhood, my parents took quite a lot of photos of me and my sister and brother when we were young.  But as many of the photos were then sent of to the far-flung family members, we don't have copies ourselves.

So a while back I bought my wonderful slide and negative scanner (you can read about it here).  This was great, especially for the slides.  

But we have heaps of black and white negatives that are about 5cm square and these do not fit in the scanner.  I looked on the internet to see if you can buy a scanner for this size of negative, but they are prohibitively expensive, so I wanted to find another solution.

And I have found it!

It was simply a case of using my ordinary scanner to scan in the negative on 'Greyscale' setting.  Then I pasted the image into 'Paint' (you can use other programs like Photoshop, I believe, but I haven't tried that out yet) and went to the 'Image' button and selected 'Invert Colors'.

I then copied it back into a photo editing program and adjusted the contrast and brightness.  Although the images are not as good as I'd like, it is a start, and I can now have a play around with different methods, to see if I can get better results.  And even if these are as good as it gets, they are still enough to get the memories flowing...

A day out to visit relatives in Oxford.  I think we went to an art shop and got new blocks of colour for our watercolour sets.  Strange the things you remember.

Sitting on the log at the end of the garden.  The garden backed onto the New River, which was built in the early 1600s to bring fresh drinking water to London.

We were given this swing by our cousins' grandparents, I think.  I loved it throughout my childhood, spending hours swooping away on it.  I had solid metal instead of chains, so you couldn't waste time lying on your tummy and twirling yourself round on it - you had to get on and do what it was intended for!

Aren't computers great?