My name is Henri Bersoux. When I started taking pictures in the early seventies you had to know how to compose a good picture, evaluate lighting and other factors, and catch the moment. There were no computer programs to fix redeye and no cameras with automatic white balance bracketing.
Today everyone is a photographer. What today's small army of digital photographers cannot do, however, is travel back in time and capture a long lost moment. But I can. I find the lost or overlooked negatives and bring them back to life. I still take pictures for my own pleasure, and some of them will be here, but I find greater pleasure and 'treasure' in bringing old negatives back to life.
When I say, 'restoration,' I mean just that. It holds the same meaning to me as 'restoring' an old house to its original condition, not 'renovating' it by adding things that were not there in the first place. Think of how burned skin can be replaced with healthy skin from another part of the body. Where a negative is scratched I painstakingly lift and copy adjoining cells, or pixels, and feather them in place of the damaged areas. No quick fixes. No special effects. Long, long hours spent scrutinizing images -- sometimes at the individual pixel level of which there can be, for some negatives, as many as 6400 per inch.
Most of the negatives I purchase come from estate auctions, some of them combined, so I seldom have information on the photographer. When I do, the photographer's work is clearly labelled in a separate folder.
Henri Bersoux joined Pixels.com Licensing on September 30th, 2012.
