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The Team
My cousin Catherine visits from our home village of Brynamman for Sunday dinner once or twice a month. For many years now she has been researching our family tree. She is also involved with the Black Mountain Centre in the village, helping out in the café and contributing to the small museum they have there. She is consequently always keen to find old photographs of the family, and this week she asked me to scan in one she’d been loaned of Brynamman cricket team in the 1940s. Her father, my dad’s eldest brother Raymond, had been the secretary at the time and was in the photograph (standing far left).
I scanned the image at high resolution and saved the file to Photoshop ready for retouching. The photo was badly damaged, with fold marks and foxing as well as scuffs and dirt. I always scan the image in colour and then copy layers up before each transformation is performed on a desaturated version. I touch out the obvious folds and spots, then work to remove smaller blemishes and repair damage and remove other marks. It’s a time consuming process but also an enjoyably rewarding one.
As I got into the detail of the retouching, blurring and sharpening, using the clone stamp and healing brushes on missing areas, I began to think about these sepia ghosts that were squinting back at me from that long past summer’s day. As their features crystallised and sharpened I found myself wondering about their…
