As mentioned in a previous post, Steve from Taranaki had called me up regarding getting three large canvas prints made of Mount Taranaki photos. They needed to be ready by the coming Thursday. I told Steve no problems, I’d do them over the weekend and have them ready by Tuesday at the latest. Everything was completed and sent on Monday, Steve notifying me they’d arrived Tuesday - well in time for him to meet his deadline.

Above are a couple of photos of 2 of Steve’s canvas prints coming out the Z3100 wide format printer. As the printer can do up to 44 inches or 1118mm wide, the canvas prints are huge!

Mr Smith sent me 9 photos of members of his relatives taken around 1943. He wanted selected members taken from the photos, chest up, and have a simple white oval vignette put around them. 3 copies of each photo was printed to a 6×4 size, the other copies to be given to his family.

The different photo with the woman listening to the gramophone is an interesting side story. The lady was virtually deaf - and the only sounds she could hear was country music played through the gramophone!

Mr Matheson visited me again with another job of image separation. The man in question was his grandfather Donald “Dan” Matheson. He immigrated to New Zealand in 1860 aged 9 years. He came out on the Ellen Lewis settler ship which landed at Waipu Northland. He was originally from Novia Scotia. The tall man was his son Kennith Murdoch Matheson whom was killed in the Somme, France Oct 1st 1916. Dan lived to 90 years.

This was quite a difficult job as there was very little in the way of foreground imagery to work with. Mr Matheson was very happy with the results.

Nothing visual to show today - I’ve been busy scanning in a lot of photos for various customers, ready for printing next week. Also just putting thru some large 1200mm long canvas prints for Steve down in Taranaki. With permission, I hope to show some of the work next week. In the meantime the scanner and Z3100 are chugging merrily away. Not much rest this weekend!

Neal

Shirley gave me these photos to enhance and reprint. The top image was a photocopy of an aerial photo taken of her family’s land (the Meldrums). This covered a hotel and various private dwellings situated at the northern end of Orewa, New Zealand. The photo was taken around 1953-54.

The large building adjacent to the tennis court was called the ‘Meldrum Private Hotel’, built in 1926 by Noe & Lily Meldrum. This was later changed to the ‘Hibiscus Hotel’ in 1958 when it was sold. Now a new apartment block is situated on the land called “The Palms” after the Palm trees seen in the photo.

As an interesting aside, HN Meldrum’s name was Huntly Noel as he was born in Huntly on Christmas eve! In the far top right hand corner, one of the uncles by the name of Burnard, lived in the little shack and was apparently a bit of a hermit.

The bottom photo is Shirley’s parents. The photo was originally hand coloured, but Shirley wanted it printed in black and white. I removed any marks and gave it a few tweaks. Shirley was thrilled with the results.

Jenny came to me with this photo of her and her family taken a while ago. Jenny wanted the family image converted to black and white and have a closer cropped vignette effect . I also removed any marks - a light restoration fixed it up good as new.

Jan bought in this photo where the negative of the roll of film was water damaged. Earlier this year, Jan and her husband had been tramping in the Kaimanawa Ranges, central North Island New Zealand. She had the camera in the bottom of her tramping pack. As they were crossing a stream, the bottom of the pack dipped into the stream. The camera took a dunking too, resulting in the negatives getting water spots on them.

I was able to remove all evidence of the spots and bring the photo back to original condition.

John came to me with 13 photos covering his wife’s hockey team and his own rugby one. They ranged in age from 14 to 22 years old. They’d been stored away in his basement and started suffering from water damage and mould. Luckily most of the photos were relatively intact - the card board backing of the photos with writing had suffered the most.

Instead of trying to fix the backgrounds too, it was decided to extract the photos then rebuild the backgrounds from scratch. The photos were fixed where needed - marks removed and faded colors enhanced. They were then extracted from their backgrounds. A template was created for the background, titles and team lists. There, all the wording was added to match the original photos. The teams were added and 11 x 14 inch size prints were made for each team. The resulting prints looked excellent.

Jan came to me with a photo of one of her children to be put onto canvas. She’d already had two done of her other children, so wanted to add to the collection. The photo was scanned and enlarged then printed on canvas. The HP Z3100 prints perfect true neutral black and white images. Jan was thrilled with the results, and has just had another baby so looks like there’ll be another photo added to the collection in the future!

Mr Matheson came to me with photo of his father in a family group photo. He wanted to have just his father on his own. The lady on the left hand side had her arm covering part of the man’s own arm. This was removed, the man’s missing arm added in, and the left hand side of the back ground created. The man was Donald Mathseon and fought in the New Zealand army in World War I. He was wounded in Pachendale, France 12th October 1917 and lived to 16 days short of his 94th birthday.