Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Celebrating The Holiday
13 October 2014
With disagreement even over its name, today isn't entirely convincing as a holiday. And yet, determined minds will always find some way to celebrate.
Replica Niña. In 1996 at Santa Barbara, surrounded by sailboats.
Anyone who prefers to call it Columbus Day can still marvel at the achievement in 1492 of sailing a wooden box across the unforgiving Atlantic and making the return trip, too.
Those who find more meaning in calling it Indigenous People's Day (or any of its variants) can marvel at the resilience of the cultures that survived the European onslaught it brought on. Not just their proselytizing but their diseases, as well.
Caught between both parties, we happened to remember an old image that perfectly suits the occasion.
But we had to dig back through our film archives to 1996 when a replica model of the Niñ anchored in Santa Barbara surrounded by sailboats. It was sailing up the California coast at the time.
As we approached the ship, we took a shot with our Nikon FM2 loaded with Kodak Gold 400. Which lens? We'd have to think it was our 43-86mm Nikkor. We liked the flexibility of the little zoom for adventures like this.
We scanned the film on a CanoScan 9000F first using the Canon plug-in for Photoshop CS5 and then with the latest ViewScan. ViewScan, you might suspect, worked harder (two passes with a curve for Kodak Gold 400) and consequently delivered a better scan.
But we weren't done.
We opened the image in Photoshop CC 2014.2 to refine the color (white balance needed adjustment), sharpen the image and retouch it. There were a lot of defects (ah, the film era) that a quick tap with the Healing Brush eliminated.
The result is clearly from another era. But we're pretty happy we 1) remembered the shot, 2) found the negative, 3) could scan it with VueScan on Mavericks and 4) clean it up with Photoshop CC 2014.2.
That, we think, is something to celebrate.