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Continuing with the family photo project, I decided to work on my grandfather’s folder today.

He’s probably younger in this picture than I am now by a number of years. I can’t say I knew my grandfather very well. I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me much when I was little. He changed somewhat after his stroke in 1995, when I was 15. But, by then, neither of us knew what to say to each other. I’ll say this for him. He appeared to have found a hairstyle and facial expression that he liked early on and stuck with them.

This is a photo from my grandparents’ wedding reception. I don’t know the date, but I would have to guess sometime between 1939 and 1941 from the uniform. But this was a really great find when we were going through the stacks of pictures.

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American Flats is apparently quite the common photo location over on Flickr. However, I have the distinction of being the only person with black-and-white pictures. I considered bringing color film on the trip, knowing that Niki would be taking me out there at some point, but I decided to go all black-and-white on a hunch. I knew I wanted to photograph that area in black-and-white for a reason, but I didn’t know what that reason was. Now, having finished work on those photos and put them up next to everyone else’s color shots of the same places, I know why. In color, the pictures are about the graffiti. The graffiti upstages the other elements. And it’s certainly a valid perspective to take with putting the graffiti first, but I wanted to tell a different story. In black-and-white, the graffiti seems more integrated into the whole. It goes back to a draft of an artist’s statement I wrote for my marketing class a couple years ago. I wrote that I like to make images from the perspective of an alien who’s crashed on earth and has no way of leaving. An alien wouldn’t necessarily see the graffiti as something that didn’t belong there, or as something that was added later and wasn’t intended to be part of the structure, or that the people who built the structures and the people who painted the structures would even be different groups of people. So I didn’t want to necessarily see things that way either. I wanted the graffiti to be part of the story, not the entire story.

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Oh yeah, I got an e-mail this afternoon from the art director at the agency with the O Bel Sole account, and they are really happy with the work I did for them. That was very gratifying to hear. That was a bright spot on an already good day.

There were about 4 more American Flats pictures I was thinking of finishing, but none of them are as strong as the eight I’ve already done, so I think I’ll stop now. Maybe take a fresh look at the remaining images in a month or so.

So, moving on, I am finally getting started on the huge stack of old family photos I have to scan. This is one stack among many, but it’s the only stack I have. Still, it’s huge. This stack is pictures that my second-cousin-once-removed Bill went through at my grandparents’ house in Fresno… stuff that we felt was important enough to take priority over everything else. So, I started with one of the most significant pictures, an 8×10 portrait of my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Duff Hopper. Of the various Hoppers who have contacted me since I posted the entry on Stanley Romaine Hopper’s book, The Crisis of Faith, Samuel Duff Hopper is the closest common ancestor.

This one wasn’t too bad as far as image restoration goes. Image restoration is different from retouching. It can be a little more intense than basic retouching–more on a level with glamour/fashion retouching, depending on the condition of the source image. But this one wasn’t too bad. It pretty much just required some dust removal and contrast enhancement. This was an 8×10 that was under glass still in its original frame, so it was pretty well-preserved. I’m sure there will be a few that will be a little more hairy. Anyway, if any extended family would like an 11×14 or smaller print of this, contact me.

Anyway, aside from working on other projects, I’ve also been waiting to start on this project because I’ve been looking for a more appropriate place to display the pictures on the web than here on my blog or in my Flickr stream. The ideal place would be a genealogy/family tree site, such as the one belonging to Rodney Hopper that I linked to in the prior entry. But, I’m pretty sure only Rodney Hopper can add or change information on that site, and the e-mail address listed for him is no longer valid. Plus, I would like something with a graphical interface, which would require it to be Flash-based, rather than the HTML-based lists generated on that site. So, the ideal would be something like a Facebook-style social networking site based around family and genealogy. There are a few out there. The two that I found that looked promising were Famiva.com and Geni.com. Famiva provides a lot more information about how the site works before you sign up than Geni, and I signed up for both, but after spending most of Thursday on Geni entering in the information on the Hopper family that Bill had given me when we went through the pictures, I don’t think I’ll be putting in the time for a second site. Geni works just fine, although some of its functions are a little counter-intuitive. For example, I had the following situation: one ancestor married a man and had a daughter. This ancestor then passed away. Her widowed husband then married one of her sisters, which was common up until the 20th century. They had 3 more children. Trying to get Geni’s system to recognize the two sisters’ husband as the same man took some doing. In fact, I’ll have to do the same thing again if I find out who the parents of Samuel Duff Hopper’s 2 wives were, since my great-great-grandmother was his first wife, and his second wife (Stanley Romaine Hopper’s mother) was her sister. One last thing–the Hopper family needs a moratorium on the use of the name “Mary.” There have been way too many people named Mary Hopper over the last 237 years.

The better part of my day was spent figuring out how to put that Flickr banner in the sidebar on the right. I would say I have a firm command of HTML, but don’t even ask me how PHP scripts work.