Archiving the Peter Garner Collection
As you are all probably aware Peter Garner, a former resident of Bombay Street, left his collection of photographs of St Ann’s with his friend Tony Miller for safe keeping after his death. Tony approached me and asked if I would be interested in helping to archive Peter’s collection of mostly unseen photographs of St Ann’s. Having only fairly recently done the same with my own fifty year old negatives and transparencies I of course jumped at the chance to do the same with this collection.
Many of the images were transparencies (slides), many were collections of prints, some fortunately still with the negatives in the print wallets. Because I had two film scanners from digitising my own work I was well placed to scan the slides and negatives. The prints Tony had already photographed and put some on the website so I concentrated on working on the slides and negatives. I scanned each individual slide and negative and produced large sized high-resolution digital files that are suitable for archiving. Each one of these had to be worked on in Photoshop to achieve the optimal quality in tone and colour. In addition to that I retouched the many dust marks and scratches that they had acquired in the past fifty years.
Because hopefully these images will at some stage be passed on to some form of library or history group they had to be what they call keyworded. This is the process of embedding in the digital file all the information relevant to the image. These include such things as photographer, subject matter, where taken, what date they were taken and copyright
by Peter Richardson
As you are all probably aware Peter Garner, a former resident of Bombay Street, left his collection of photographs of St Ann’s with his friend Tony Miller for safe keeping after his death. Tony approached me and asked if I would be interested in helping to archive Peter’s collection of mostly unseen photographs of St Ann’s. Having only fairly recently done the same with my own fifty year old negatives and transparencies I of course jumped at the chance to do the same with this collection.
Many of the images were transparencies (slides), many were collections of prints, some fortunately still with the negatives in the print wallets. Because I had two film scanners from digitising my own work I was well placed to scan the slides and negatives. The prints Tony had already photographed and put some on the website so I concentrated on working on the slides and negatives. I scanned each individual slide and negative and produced large sized high-resolution digital files that are suitable for archiving. Each one of these had to be worked on in Photoshop to achieve the optimal quality in tone and colour. In addition to that I retouched the many dust marks and scratches that they had acquired in the past fifty years.
Because hopefully these images will at some stage be passed on to some form of library or history group they had to be what they call keyworded. This is the process of embedding in the digital file all the information relevant to the image. These include such things as photographer, subject matter, where taken, what date they were taken and copyright
by Peter Richardson
The Step by Step Process