Bronte Country Landscapes

Something a little different. Back in 2017, along with several members of my family, I travelled to France to commemorate the centenary of my great grandfather, Frank Bennett’s death in the First World War and it was a very moving experience to stand at his graveside 100 years to the day after he died.

In preparation for the trip, I carried out a large amount of research into Frank and his wife, Geneva, discovering in the process that Frank’s younger brother, Ernest, was also killed later in the war, having joined up and trained with Frank. I decided to compile a book about Frank and distribute copies around the family before we went to France so that everyone would understand his story when we were there ‘on the day’. I had inherited some items from my grandmother relating to Frank & Geneva and my uncle owned a large family archive of photographs and other items, which he scanned for me to use in the book.

Unfortunately, because of time constraints and limited source materials being available online, there were some inaccuracies in the original book. Also, because I only had low resolution scans of the photos, their quality was quite poor. Having since inherited the family photo album and a wealth of other materials from my uncle, I have been able to add an awful lot of detail to the story and correct the earlier mistakes and, importantly, I’ve been able to scan the photos at high resolution and do a thorough digital restoration on them all. I was also able to add a number of newly discovered photos to further enhance the book.

The process of digital restoration is time-consuming, painstaking, often frustrating, occasionally infuriating but ultimately immensely satisfying. I’m always keen to leave a photo enlarged, cleaned up and sharpened to reveal hidden detail but still looking its age at the end of the process, as I hope the examples below from the book demonstrate. To be clear, as I’ve been asked this before, this is a purely digital process and not a physical restoration of the original photo.

I’ll be posting the full story here soon so watch this space.