I have always had a keen interest in history on many levels.  In addition to my own personal interest in reading books and visiting historical sites I’ve tried to find ways to incorporate history into Frameable Faces.  Not only are we capturing moments and preserving them forever when we photograph our clients, I have blogged about historical photos of American Presidents, I’ve dabbled with my Life Preservers idea on and off to do interviews with people about their personal histories and I have written about photo restoration.  This leads us to the restoration project…

Photo restoration is a special opportunity for us to help people preserve and even recover a piece of their own history that has been damaged or thought to be lost.  When someone brings in a damaged photo, we have it restored to pristine condition and return it to them and we see the tears of emotion and joy that pour out when they see the results – these are some of the best moments we have here.

Here are a couple of examples:

A lady brought in this last photo she had of her late brother from before he went off to war.  He returned from fighting but he was never the same.  This photo was faded, browned, torn, taped, incomplete and stapled to a manilla envelope (you can actually see the staple at the top of his hat).  It meant a lot to her and it meant a lot to us to present it back to her completely restored.  This is such important work.  Helping people reclaim their history.

The Frameable Faces Restoration Project

Next one of our seniors had a photo of his mom from her passport from when she came to this country as a young child.  It is the only photo that exists of her from before she came to America.  It was tiny and had part of the raised stamping from the passport on it – not exactly in great condition.

Here’s the before:

Here’s the after:

Next we have a baby picture of a lady who came to the studio while in her 90’s.  Such a sweet lady, Lucille’s photo had some damage around the edges from the frame it was in, a couple of creases and stains, and the photo was fading a little.

Here’s the before:

Here’s the after:

Here is a case of some damage and significant fading on this one… the photo was really starting to disappear and it was small – we couldn’t make it much bigger but we definitely brought her back…

The before:

The after:

Here’s a color wedding photo that had been significantly damaged and faded over time that just needed to be brought back to life…

Before:

After:

We could go on and on with examples of photos we’ve restored…

Enter Periscope and the Restoration Project…

The element we are adding to make this more of a project is the live video element.  We have an amazing community of people we have connected with literally all around the world on Periscope.  If you are unaware of Periscope it is a live streaming app owned by twitter and you can download it and follow us at @frameablefaces at this link.

At any given time in one of our live broadcasts you can be a part of a social video watching and chatting in real time with people from Australia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, The UK, France, Russia, Malaysia, Serbia, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Ukraine – the list goes on and on.  If someone in Sweden has an old damaged photo they want to restore they can scan it and send it to us digitally.  Periscope has allowed us to connect with people all over the world!

So with the Frameable Faces Restoration Project we are giving people the opportunity to come on to our channel to show the before and after photos and share the story of the photo with the rest of our community.  We can then record these and put them all together on a playlist on our YouTube channel.  If you don’t want to come on and do a live interview and would prefer to just give us the story separately for the blog that’s fine too!  The main thing is sharing stories with our community, bringing us together, reclaiming and restoring history!

Contact us for details if you’re interested!  You can call the studio at 248-790-7317, email me at doug@frameablefaces.com, or DM us on twitter at @frameablefaces

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