Stockholm - 1974

[The amateur]

For now, I have decided to borrow a scanner from a friend and digitize some existing analog files. This is a slow but extremely interesting process.

It is true that for some people, remembering the past can be painful for one reason or another, but for me it is very interesting to discover images I have taken of people and places.
It is also true that I am finding a lot of photography that is of no interest and whose framing quality is so poor that I think to myself, "How did I do this?"
But that's the way it is, times and people change, don't they?

This photo was taken in July 1974 when I visited a friend of mine in Stockholm.
I don't know if Sweden was still receiving deserters that year, but this was one of those cases two years earlier.
He had fled Portugal to avoid participating in the war that the country was waging in Africa and for political reasons, and Sweden welcomed him with open arms, giving him housing, food, and language training. Democracies !

[DanK]

I think this has potential, but if it were mine, I'd do some editing. I did a very quick effort, with nothing but cropping and quite a bit of dodging and burning using several layers for control. All of the adjustment layers for dodging and burning used curves, but there are lots of ways to do this.

[Geoff F]

My first thoughts are the same as Dan.

Are you scanning prints or the original negatives? I have scanned thousands of old images for my local history society and often find that negatives give better results because of poor quality photo prints, particularly the extra glossy ones. But you do need a scanner which has the negative/slide scanning option.

[The amateur]

Thank you Dan and Geoff for your constructive comments.
I have so many negatives to digitise that I am not particularly concerned with the quality of the immediate result, but rather with the memories they evoke of a whole past that I lived, although the minimum essential in the images quality is important.
Thank you anyway for the effort !

I have black and white negatives, color negatives and a large quantity of slides, I am using a scanner that is a few years old and that forces me to place the strips of film from which only five photographs come out at a time, which makes the process slow, tedious and boring.

Then, I arrange the photographs in the year they were taken and assign them some keywords that I consider essential, I often run them through Topaz Denoise, which sometimes gives good results. I tried Denoise AI but it is too expensive !

And then to complicate things, some rolls of film are not dated and then I have to use my memory or someone else's to place the image in time.
But in the meantime, some of them go straight to the trash.

This work aims essentially to gather images that present memories of the family and are placed on my personal page for a very limited number of people.

Back to 1974 with my friend who has since passed away.