Just making an update regarding the purchase of my new Nikon 9000 slide and negative scanner. I have been making progress! It’s just been taking longer to get everything up and running as I’ve been busy working on some large restoration and canvas projects. Needless to say I have been slowly scanning a lot of Kodachrome slides provided by my parents to trial on. These date back to the late 60s early 70s and are ideal to work on as they have a lot of difficult slides to work on.

Included are underexposed slides which are notorious to copy. This is where the trial process is helping - what settings to make, what I need to do manually and what can be done automatically. Also times taken to scan the slides with regard to initial settings and resolution. Once I’m totally confident of the process I’ll start offering it on the website. But anyone with enquiries please don’t hesitate to contact me now.

Here’s an early scan I took. It’s a Kodachome of an old truck my father and his brother owned. They accidently backed it into a drain on my dad’s farm and got it stuck. This shows the truck and a closeup of a portion showing the detail the scanner can extract. Naturally the detail is limited by how good the original camera and photographer were!

Monday night saw hockey photos taken of the finals of the collegiate high school girls’ grades in Whangarei Northland. Kamo dominated with a team each in division 1 and division 2, playing Kerikeri Highschool and Bay of Islands College respectively. Kamo won both games. Division 3 saw Whangarei Girls High School playing Tikipunga Highschool, Whangarei Girls taking the win.

Angie brought in this water damaged photo in need of restoring. It was a picture of her mother, Connie Exton, taken in Brisbane on her 21st birthday back in 1923. The photo had  been water damaged a number of years ago. Angie acquired it after her mother passed away aged 95 years 11 months about 10 years earlier, but had only got round to having it fixed.

This was a really hard job - a lot of photo detail had been lost around her chest and neck. Making it harder was the necklace position - Connie was holding the necklace in her hand- this had to be corrected to look as original as possible. I was able to rebuild all the lost portions and make the restored photo look as good as possible. Definitely up there with the hard restoration projects!

Jan from Taupo called me last Sunday about having a damaged photo needing urgent fixing. It was a presentof for her step brother on his 6oth birthday. The couple are Ewen and Dalvine Ratcliffe, taken in 1945. She was 18, he 21. Jan needed the photo done by Wednesday so she could have it printed and framed in Taupo for the 6oth the next Saturday. I put my other work aside and got stuck in, finishing restoration of the image on Tuesday morning. Jan was totally rapt with the final result. I’d have to rank the difficulty as 9/10 or maybe even 10!

Updated: Whangaroa County Museum & Archive Society photo restoration project. As I mentioned previously, I had this large project of photo repair work to do. Here you can see one of the works in progress as the photo damaged is slowly fixed. Here you can see one of the men is nearly obliterated. However, with patience he’s been brought back to near new condition. The project continues…

Kelly and Evan whom run the Towai Tavern, Northland, New Zealand, gave me a series of photos to repair, enhance and print. The Towai Tavern is undergoing an extensive restoration itself and the couple wanted to display a series of photos of the surrounding area from the late 19th, early 20th century. The three photos above are an example of some of the work I did. The top image is the local butchers run by the Brock Brothers. The 2nd is Ruapekaka Road junction only a km up the road from the tavern. And finally, an old slaughter house on the Wallace farm. So if you driving up north from Whangarei, call in at the Tavern for a look around and a beer!

Megan from
Photography by Megan
came to see me about printing a landscape photo onto canvas. Megan had been referred to me by Louise Panther Photography after she’d seen some of Louise’s canvas prints I’d done for her. This bush scene canvas print  mounted onto a 100cm x 64cm frame and to be delivered to Megan’s customer down in Auckland. Megan was thrilled with the final quality and construction of the print.

Christine and Glenn from Hamilton contacted me regarding having a large wedding photo printed and mounted on canvas. They’re both car fans and wanted a wedding photo of them and their vehicles included. I asked them what size did they want? They asked how big could I do it? I replied, maximum height framed would be 970mm, but I could easily do 2000mm wide. They said go for it. Here’s the canvas mounted wedding print with Christine and Glenn beside it, their Bedford V8 van behind, after I delivered it.

The Northland Hockey Association just completed its finals day of senior hockey August 31st. I was around to take hockey photos of 6 games during the day. Over 600 photos uploaded, with over 8000 photo viewings in 24 hours, so the site is very popular, locally and gaining more followers from around the world. Here are two photos from the day, the top is from the mens’ reserve grade, Whangarei Boys High School in black vs Mangapai. Mangapai won the game. The 2nd is the womens’ premier grade final - Whangarei Girls High School in blue playing Maungakaramea. Maungakaramea took out the final.