Connecting With My Past

This week, I got a small parcel in the mail.  It's always exciting to get unexpected surprises, but this turned out to be the best present I may have ever received.  You see, the package contained CDs of digitized images of all of my Dad's old slides.  It turns out that my brother Wolfgang, the handsome little fellow with the vest on, had taken the many boxes of slides (almost 3,000 images) and scanned them into his computer, over the period of several weeks, so that he could digitize all of our family images and then he sent a set of the disks to each of his sibs.

The timing is fabulous since as you may know from recent posts, I have just started using Lightroom and I'm in the process of organizing all of my images.  I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have all of these images, dating back to the late 50s, of my brothers and I growing up. The pictures date back to shortly after my parents and three oldest brothers arrived from Germany, through to the mid 80s.

And so this week, I'm taking a trip down memory lane, to a shot of my four brothers with me, their baby sister.  Yes, I'm the youngest of five and the only girl.  And to make life even more interesting, when I was four my aunt and my cousin Karl came to live with us so from that point on I essentially had five older brothers, two moms and my dad!

I'm not sure what the occasion is in this picture...perhaps there wasn't one, because I know that Mom would have us dress up for family photos now and then 'just because'.

I didn't have to do much to get that vintage feel in these images LOL.  I added a layer of Kim Klassen's 'Daisy' texture (from her new Downton Abbey Collection) at soft light, using a 75% opacity, and then brushed most of that off of our faces, leaving a soft vignette around the outside of the image.  I also decided to add the vintage frame to the image since the slides, and therefore the digital images, were missing that.

In this second image, probably taken about a year later, we have the five of us again.  This may actually be my favourite picture of the five of us!  Again I added a bit of a texture (Isobel, from the same collection).  As with the other image, I used a soft light blend mode and removed most of the texture from our faces before adding the frame.

It's going to take me some time to get through all of these photos and add keywords, etc. but as I'm sure you can imagine, it is going to be a labour of love!

Linking up with Our World Tuesday, Texture Tuesday, Sweet Shot Tuesday and Photo Art Friday.