My mother departed this world in October last year. We were devastated. But the consolation we had was that we the children stood around her in her later years. We were always there for her. One of my brothers so much touched by her departure lives outside the country. I was with him shortly after mum passed away. He brought out some old pictures. One of them he so much love and cherish. It was the picture of himself carried in a shawl by mum as a baby. The picture, a monochrome, and just 5 by 4 size, taken around the 1960, as you might expect, was in a very bad state. Luckily, the faces were not so affected by the age and poor state of the paper. He wanted me to fix it if I could. After all, I am a photographer. Of course, I gladly agreed. I was emotional about the picture as much as he was and promised to do my best.
Photograph restoration has never been my strongest point. And this particular picture would need all I could give it. But I had challenges. My work as a medical doctor hardly gives one the chance to do anything else. So six months down the line, the restoration work was still pending. Guilty conscience finally pushed me to start on the picture.
By this time, my picture editing skill was at the lowest. You don't practice often what you learnt, the skills would diminish. So, taking the picture with me, I entered Affinity Photos Software and came out after over three hours with an initial result. You can see the original picture.
And the picture after the initial restoration work is shown below.
Though I much agree that work still need to be done on the picture to bring it unto an acceptable state.
But one thought came to my mind while doing this work. Does an average customer realize how much efforts go into photo editing, post production, or restoration? Can you as a photographer ever be paid enough to reward the work you put into the pictures you process? There is a limit to how much you can charge your clients for photo restoration work. Will your pay justify the efforts put into the work? If you use Adobe Photoshop, chances are that you are paying monthly for the software. Then it might take several days to bring a photo to an acceptable standard. And of course, you might combine softwares to bring out the best in just a single photograph.
This particular picture I am working on is being done joyfully out of love and emotions with no financial considerations. All I aim at is emotional satisfaction for myself and my brother.
But I want to use this to tell the world at large that we need to appreciate the photographers more and pay them adequately for their efforts. It is not easy. No job ever is.
Let us learn to acknowledge and appreciate art when we see one, and reward the artist as much as we can for their talents, training, and work.
