Old Lester Family Photos

This post has some old Lester Family photos.

Mom had a place on the wall for photos at the condo (and the Salmon Street house), and also boxes full of photos. When she moved to Russellville, most of the photos were dispersed (thanks to those who went through them all and sorted them), but she was left with a box of framed photos from the wall that didn’t apply to any family in particular. One year when I was there she wanted to get rid of the box of framed photos in her closet, and we asked around if anybody wanted them. Nobody did, but I didn’t want to throw them out, so I took them (I managed to fit them in my suitcase). The photos went from a box in her closet to a box in my closet :).

I have now taken them out of the frames and scanned them, and posted them here. In addition to the framed photos, I included three more. In the stack of little 3×3 photos I got, there were three that I thought were interesting: one of Grandma and Grandpa Lester (Grandpa with the suit and hat), one of the family with the Christmas tree, and one of the train set.

There was one large (9×14) frame with a collage from Dad’s family. Dad had written on each photo, and on the back of the frame, what each photo was. I indicated in the caption which ones are from the collage. These were all pretty poor quality, but I like the one of the Fiske family. One thing I noticed is that we have family photos from each of Mom and Dad’s parents, except for the Lesters (i.e. from Mom’s side we have the Olk and Anderson families, and from Dad’s side we have the Fiske but not the Lester family). Maybe our great grandparents on the Lester side didn’t have photos taken, or maybe they are lost, or maybe our cousins on the Lester side have them.

I now have all the photos out of their frames in a folder. I scanned the pictures with higher resolution than I posted on the website, so if you want a higher resolution file I’ll send it to you.

At first I thought I would have them professionally scanned with better equipment than I have. In the end, I just used the scanner on our HP ‘all in one’ printer. The original photo quality isn’t that great on some of the pictures, so the professional quality scanner won’t help with that. I think the results are ‘good enough’. I wrote some details on how I scanned them below, if you are interested.

Here are the pictures:

I’ll document here how I scanned the photos, for future reference.

I used our HP Office Jet Pro 8600 Plus all in one printer. On my desktop computer I used the HP scan utility that came with the printer. For each photo I entered the dimensions into the utility before scanning. I used 600 dpi (dots per inch). This is higher resolution than is needed for printing, but allows the photos to be enlarged. The scanner goes up to 4800 dpi, but this creates huge files, especially for the larger photos. For the website I made new files with reduced resolution that makes them load faster, and still be viewed with ‘good enough’ quality on the computer. My normal practice for the website is that the ‘long side’ of the photo is 900 pixels. For photos in the ‘portrait’ mode, the 900 pixels is approximately the width of the website.