#ladybirdgoeswest

Last week I worked on an Instagram project at work for Lady Bird's "Western Trip" to Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming in August 1964. It was fun to look through our contact sheets and scan photos that have never been digitized before. A lot of my job is fulfilling researcher requests, which are usually photos that we already have scanned or popular photos that we've all seen before. It's refreshing to go digging in the archives to see what you can find - some nice portraits of Lady Bird and beautiful photographs of America's landscape. Although I think my favorite is her reaction to the buffalo barbecue...

dear bird

photos from the LBJ Presidential Library

February is over! I can't believe tomorrow it will be March. Since I dedicated a whole week to Valentine's Day, I thought it would be nice to post about a last minute assignment that I worked on that week. On Feb. 13, our Supervisory Archivist Claudia Anderson talked to press about the 1934 courtship letters between LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson. The letters have been released to the public, check them out here if you're interested.

color correction

Oh, the color correction debate! This is something I've been wanting to touch on for a while, since I deal with this problem everyday at work. The big question surrounds the digitization of archival photographs and whether they should be left "as is" or color corrected "as it should be?" Now, the real problem here is when you scan a color negative and say it's "as is," meaning that the scan you've got is a representation of what is on the negative, you're wrong. Here's why... Something I think archivists aren't taking into account (especially if they are not scanning the images themselves), is the accuracy of the scanner to auto-detect color. If you are wanting a full frame image you have to crop it yourself. (Editorial note: The scanner I use at work is an EPSON V700 Photo Scanner). When you determine the area to be scanned, it automatically color corrects the image and selects true blacks and whites based on the crop. So if you crop in or out or leave in the black border around the image, you will end up with three totally different looking images. Case in point: the images below... The first was done before I started working at the LBJ Library. The second has been rescanned and edited based on a darkroom print of the same image hanging up in AV Archives (made before they went digital around 2002). Now, being that NARA's definition for digitizing for public access includes "quality control of digital copies and metadata" and "providing public access to the material via online delivery of reliable and authentic copies." I would say the image on the left is not reliable or authentic to the image on the negative; the water in Oregon is obviously not cyan. When rescanned and minimally edited, everyone looks peachy. I didn't get the cyan color cast at all the second time. So which is the reliable and authentic image that should be delivered to the public as an accurate representation of this negative?

D782-9a. Photo by Robert Knudsen. Lady Bird Johnson on a trail in the Multnomah Falls National Scenic Area near Troutdale, Oregon on June 27, 1968.

time lapse and other new year's resolutions

One of my New Year's resolutions this year is to get my photography website up and running. It's something that I've been talking about for a really long time. Years actually. So it's about time that I buckle down and start going through my multiple-terabyte hard drive(s) to pick out some images. My other tech-related resolution is to post everyday on this blog. I'm starting a project where I'm going to be talking about photography a lot and I might as well start with my own. All while keeping up with work at the LBJ Presidential Library. Which, by the way, is open again. Go see it. We've been working really hard the last few months before the doors opened again on Dec. 22. This is one of the projects I did. Time lapse is fun but time consuming... Happy New Year and cheers to all those people that follow through with their resolutions.

self portrait

I'm never too fond of posting or taking a self portrait, but this one caught me by surprise -- like most things the past month. I was lucky enough to get hired as the AV Multimedia Specialist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum! I am their official photographer, but I also get to work with the Audiovisual Archives -- which includes about a million photographs. No joke. A million photographs. LBJ's personal photographer during his stay at the White House was Yoichi Okamoto, who was the first photographer to have unprecedented access to the President. The negatives and prints resting in the cold vault of the archive are incredible. They are true treasures -- American history preserved on thin strips of celluloid. I'm a lucky lady. Inspired, I ventured out to start my own stockpile of digital images for the Library -- and came across my reflection in the window.

Self portrait - LBJ Library and Museum - 2012