Overview
Our thanks to Bob Stroub for retrieving Helena's and Edward's photos from Puerto Rico, sorting them all for distribution, and sending us this group.
What's Here. The set Bob sent contains 352 photos of Helena and Edward, their friends, and their relatives on the Aronowitz side. Of these, 259 were loose, and 93 were mounted on album pages. There are also a few letters and notes. Everything is posted here.
Condition of the Photos. Many of the prints are in poor condition. Two of the oldest had severely darkened due to improper processing when the print was developed. A number of prints suffered from minor mold damage, stains, tears, and scratches. Some were badly faded. And over time, color had shifted on many of the color prints, because colors fade at different rates.
Restoration and Editing. I digitally edited some of the photos to repair the damage just mentioned — for instance the one on the home page. Sometimes I edited simply to improve tone, color, framing, or other aspects. In all cases I posted both the original and edited versions. These always have the same image number, with suffixes to distinguish originals, edited, and cropped versions.
Requests for Digital Restoration or Editing. I edited only a fraction of what's here. I enjoy doing this, so if you'd like me to restore or edit any of the other photos, let me know the image numbers. Also, let me know if you'd like me to take another stab at any I have already done. I can use the feedback. You can write to me via Contact.
Distribution of Originals. The originals will be distributed as explained in Requesting Originals
Viewing Images. See Tips on Viewing Images.
Downloading Images. All the images are available for download in a size appropriate for screen viewing and for quality prints up to around 5 or 6 inches on the longer side. Many of the images are also available at still higher resolution, appropriate for making larger prints. Images can be downloaded individually, or all of them together (along with the documents) in a single zipped file. For details on all of this, see How to Download Images.
Printing Photos. All the scans were made at 600 ppi (pixels per inch) or more. Although the relationship between ppi and dpi (dots per inch) is complicated, the scans should yield quality prints (~300 dpi) up to at least double the size of the original — and sometimes much larger — provided that you download the rendition with the highest available resolution. (See How to Download Images.)
Organization of Photos. In Photographs the photos are divided into 23 groups. Groups 1-5 are pre-1950; the rest (except the baby photo of Edward) are later. Groups 1-19 are loose photos. Due to my workflow the loose photos are grouped mainly according to size. But for the most part this also groups them in different time-periods, since different cameras, with different film formats, were used in different periods. Groups 20-22 are from Helena's photo album. Group 23 is a set of photos I took of Helena's intact album pages in order to preserve her handwritten captions — see Captions for the reason. (There are a few discontinuities in the image-numbering within groups. That's because I moved three photos from one group to another, as I learned more about dates.).
Captions. Helena included captions for most of her photos. Those are all here, in full. In a few cases I photographed them; otherwise I typed them in — in which case they are always within quotation marks to set them apart from any added notes of my own. See Captions for information on the format, how to view them online and offline, and for a note about their preservation.
The Fleet Photo. You probably already have a copy of the 2002 restoration of the Fleet family photo. I did a new restoration which you might like better. Or maybe not, 😬.
Previous/Next Buttons for Easier Navigation among Groups? Maybe I will add that someday. In the meantime, please click on Photographs in the top menu, then select the group you want.
Technical Info. All the color photos and most of the black and white ones were scanned as TIFF files using the ProPhoto color space, and then imported into Lightroom as DNG files. They were exported from Lightroom and uploaded to the website as JPG files using the sRGB color space. If anyone prefers having the raw TIFFs or DNGs, (or JPGs in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto color space), let me know. It would take only about ten minutes to set that up for you.