Tag: photos

Back in the game

I got Family Tree Maker 16 “Collector’s Edition” – normally like a hundred bucks, but got it for like $35 on Amazon. It comes with a year’s subscription to Ancestry.com, so I was poking around to see if I could find any documents. It’s been a while since I’ve done any research, so it was nice to get back into it.

I found a picture of the S.S. Campania, which my great-grandparents Samuel and Annie Aidinoff took to America. I found the ship’s manifest a while ago, but always nice to have photos, even if they are generic.

I also found some listings of my great-great-grandfather, Horatio Firth, who was a doctor in Brooklyn.

Nothing really exciting yet, like more branches on the ol’ family tree, but still looking.

Scannin’

I’ve been doing a little slide scanning, when I was at my grandfather’s house after the funeral, I found a few trays of slides in his basement, under some odds and ends. I’ve scanned about 60 so far. A lot of the photos are over or under exposed, to the point of not being useful, the slides weren’t sorted, just slapped into trays. There are even black slides and end-of-roll slides in there.

Right now I’m just scanning them in and saving them, I chose to do them at 600 DPI, seems a reasonable tradeoff between quality, size and speed. If there are any standout images I’ll do touch up and restoration work on them.

Here’s kind of a fun one, it appears to be my parents dressed up for halloween, my mom looks like she’s dressed as Rosie the Riveter, my dad looks like he’s dressed as a millionaire.

Neil and Moses

Another test scan on my new scanner, a pic of Neil from around 1976.
Looks a lot like recent-vintage Moses. The nose is a little different, but otherwise pretty damn close.

Neil and Moses

A Scanner Brightly

I’ve been thinking about getting a better scanner, both for increased speed and quality, and also so I can scan slides and negatives.

So far I’m leaning towards the Epson Perfection V700. It’s $500, but payday is this Friday…

Here’s a flash walkthrough of the features.
And here’s a review.

It looks pretty snazzy. Adam keeps chiming in that I should get a sheet-fed one, but I don’t think photos feed in with a sheet-fed scanner. So unless I wanted to scan and OCR books, I don’t really need a sheet-fed.