Restoring views of the fair
As I've said before, one of the challenges in making this film has been gathering the photos,slides, and home movies of the fair itself. Once we get those materials though, that's only the beginning of the process to prepare them for the movie. Although time-consuming, one of my favorite parts of that process is slide restoration.
deteriorating35mm slides can offer an incredible amount of detail, however given their small size, it doesn't take much of a scratch, piece of dust, or hair to ruin a good shot. Then there's the fact that these slides are now nearly 50 years old. In some cases, the slides after deteriorated or discolored through the years.
As I said, the process of restoring/cleaning these slides digitally takes a lot of time, especially when you have thousands of slides in front of you. At first, we planned on only cleaning the slides that made it into the film. However, the history that these slides represent is too important to not take this opportunity to clean and restore all of them. So, although it has added some time to getting the movie completed, I think it has certainly been well worth it.
Here's a look at the before and after of one slide of the British Lion Pub:
Ryan Ritchey
Reader Comments (2)
I attended the fair with my family when I was 6. I commend your effort to restore these images. I have my own slides and 8mm movies of the fair. Coming from the photo processing industry, I see the "after" photo as incomplete. Specifically, it has not been color corrected.
Careful, this can get addictive and consume your life! There's always one more improvement on the horizon. It's fun, though, to see the end results.
Here's a page I did on restoring slides in case folks like to get an idea of what is involved: http://www.worldsfairphotos.com/restoration/index.htm