Jess LeClair Photography Blog

Now is the perfect time to start thinking about getting some family portraits taken for this year!  Some of you reading this will very shortly receive a little present from me in the mail.  I’ve just sent out reminder postcards that include a special gift - a $10 off coupon good towards a family sitting fee with me!  If you are interested in receiving one of these postcards or being on my mailing list for future goodies, please email me through the “Contact Me” portion of this website!  I promise I will NEVER EVER NEVER sell your name or information to any other company.  Ever.  And I only send a hand full of mailings a year and I also promise that they will all be worth your while! And really, in this age of email and instant messages, isn’t it kinda fun to still get snail mail every once in a while?

Even if you aren’t interested in getting mail from me, I am still available for family portraits.  All my sittings are at the location of your choice - I will come to you!  Call or email me for more information or to make an appointment.  I can also help you make greeting cards in a variety of shapes and sizes.  But as with most things around the holidays, the sooner the better!

I keep changing my mind about how I’m going to keep track of this whole Photo-A-Day project! I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with posting my images to flickr, but less about the blog! So I think that what I am going to start doing is posting my favorite photo of the week here! All the rest will still be available over at my flickr site!

Okay, so my favorite from this week has to be Day 52:

Recently I pulled out one of my old Polaroid cameras and have been playing with the double exposure feature! Not all Polaroid cameras have this feature and in fact most don’t! But Minolta made a camera in 1990 called the Minolta Instant Pro that used Polaroid Spectra film. It’s become highly sought after by artists now because of the degree of control it allows the user to have over the image. The best thing about mine? I got it for free! I found it at the dump in my hometown and picked it up on a whim. In its day it sold for more than $200!

You may have heard that on February 8th of this year, Polaroid announced its plan to cease production on all instant films. I found the news deeply saddening. And I started thinking about what Polaroid film has meant to me. Seems a strange to think of film as meaningful, but Polaroid has always been a part of my life. Gigi (my father’s mother) has had a Polaroid camera since I can remember - quite literally since I was born.

Every time the family got together, out came the Polaroid. By the end of the visit, there was always a stack of photos on the kitchen counter documenting the entire visit. If we came late to a family event, we always knew that we could find the stack and catch up on anything we may have missed. And always at the end of the visit, we’d gather for a group photo which was always taken at least twice. That way we could take a copy home with us right then.

One year, Gigi got a new Polaroid camera and gave the old one to my brother. I think I used it as often as he did! Each box of film was a treasure. She sometimes gave them to us for Christmas or our birthdays and we knew that we had to make them last. They were so expensive! $10 for 10 pictures seemed like it may as well have been a million dollars. But it was SO HARD not to just rip through the film as soon as we got it.

Polaroid was to me what digital cameras are to kids today. A way to instantly re-live and review events as they are happening. I taught an after-school art program recently and as a treat one afternoon, brought my polaroid cameras with some old film for the students to work with. I was so excited to share this opportunity to use the film (which is still fairly expensive) with them. And they just looked at me so blankly. I realized it was meaningless to them. Instant film? Why bother? We have digital cameras! Of course, as soon as they played with them a little, the magic of the thing was obvious. And by the end of the afternoon, they all wanted to know where they could rush out and buy one for their very own!

When I graduated from college in 2000, Gigi gave me a small photo album with a silver cover engraved with my name. In it were photos she’d taken of me - mostly polaroids. My entire life so far. It was such a treat - such an amazing gift to have these images. In a moment of extreme generosity (or weakness, I’m not sure which), I’ve decided to share some of them with you. The first ones are posted above, labeled with Gigi’s awesome calligraphy (I can’t even call it handwriting, though it is how she writes all the time!). I have many more, but these are some of my favorites and show the spread of years quite nicely.

Keep in mind some of these images are more soul baring than others, so be nice!! Not all of us had the good sense not to go with fashion trends as they were happening…

One last note and then I’ll stop. There is a wonderful website out there called Save Polaroid. These lovely folks are doing their best to convince another company to take up where Polaroid is leaving off and start producing instant film again. They have a great “action pack” with things you can to to help their cause. If you have a second, check them out and see what you can do to help!

Okay, so late doesn’t even begin to describe this post. However, there are two very good reasons why. First, as I mentioned before, we (my Mom, Dad, brother and hubby) took a family vacation to the Dominican Republic from January 19-26. Second, on January 23 I got more sick than I have been in my life so far. I spiked a fever of 101 and had some other totally gross and disgusting bodily things going on (since this is a family type blog, I’ll refrain from more colorful details). When I went down to the infirmary in the hotel where we were staying, they promptly hooked me up to an IV (massive dehydration). As much fun as being sick in another country was, flying back to the US while still sick was even more fun! Today is the first day I’ve actually really felt okay in the past week and a half. So now it is time to start catching up with my life and getting things back on track!

Since I knew we were leaving on vacation, I deliberately left the theme of the photos for week three open. They are sort of a mish-mash of things but hopefully interesting nonetheless. If you click on any of the photos, it will take you to my flickr site where I’ve put more of a description on each one. Enjoy!

Day 15

Day 16

Day 17

Day 18

Day 19

Day 20

Day 21

Tomorrow I’ll post the photos from week four and then things will be closer to all caught up!

One of my very favorite things to do (besides photographing people of course) is to restore old photographs. I love taking something that is so degraded and ruined and making it whole again. We live in a wonderful digital age when restoring old images is so much easier than it used to be. Time was, the only way to reproduce something for which you had no negative was to re-photograph the old image to get a new negative to make another print from the new negative. And anyone who has ever seen a photograph of a photograph can tell that you loose something in the way of quality. Now we can just scan old photos and make another print! We can even scan old negatives! This summer I taught a digital imaging class with my husband at the Hutchinson Center (an extension of UMO in Belfast). One of my students had unearthed some old negatives that his great-grandmother had taken. The fact that his family still had them was cool enough. But we managed to take it a step further. Using the school’s film scanner, we scanned some of the negatives into the computer and made stunning 8×10 prints in a matter of 15 minutes or so. In a chemical darkroom, that would have taken a whole afternoon of fiddling around. How cool is that? As my student said, “My mother is going to freak out!”

So here are a few examples of photographs that I have restored. For information on pricing, please see the Photo Restoration page.

This first one is one of my favorites. I deliberately put up the smallest image size possible because all I had to work with was a tiny little 1 inch square. Notice how a whole chunk of her hat is missing. It used to be that if a photo was ripped or a piece of it was missing, the only way to fix it would be to hand paint (or airbrush) the missing part. Talk about time consuming. And next to impossible if large bits were gone.

And now look! A whole hat! And you can actually see her! I could make up to an 10×10 image of this woman and still have a perfectly sharp clear image.

This image was so faded, you could hardly see her face!

This one (below) was pretty cool as well. This young man is a tintype (also called a “ferrotype”). The image is printed directly onto a very thin piece of black enameled iron, which is part of why he looks so dark to begin with. The black bits you see are actually the iron showing through where the emulsion has scraped off.

Now, I know there are some people who totally disagree with restoring old images. They feel that these items are historical objects, and as such, should not be tinkered with, just preserved as they are. If everyone had the ability to mount and frame their images with museum quality materials and keep them temperature controlled forever, I would say sure, keep only the originals. But let’s be honest. Most people keep old family photos in moldy cardboard boxes. Or worse, found that their parents or grandparents stored them that way. And without some serious intervention, the images would be lost forever. You can’t really tell in the scan, but at the bottom of the original tintype of the young man, the emulsion is flaking off (it looks like a white stripe coming up his pant leg). Had they waited any longer to have the image scanned, whole chunks of the original image would have been lost. And when it comes to images of your family, what is really more important - that you display an original photograph or that you can see the people in the picture? This way, the image is preserved. What you would really want to do with something as cool as a tintype is display both the original and the restored image side by side. Because, let’s face it, there is something deeply cool about having an actual tintype. It is a piece of history. Its not something that is made anymore (except by a few dedicated photographic artists). But they are a bit hard to see and we know they don’t last forever. So having the image scanned and restored ensures that when your children have children, their children will still be able to see it.

There is something really awesome about the moment when you hand back a photograph of someone’s grandmother or great-grandfather that they’d chalked up as a loss. It’s priceless really. Helping people preserve their own history is in many ways just as important as making the images that will become their children’s history.

Gee, I love my work!

On my father’s side of the family, I have become the “go-to girl” for family photos. Every year, my grandmother sends out a holiday card with a photo of everyone in the family. Now it used to be that if you missed the day, tough luck, you weren’t in the photo that year. Very few people ever missed photo day for just that reason (well, that and my grandmother also tends to throw kick-ass parties on photo day). Alas, we have now entered the digital age. If you weren’t actually there, you can now be Photoshopped in! Amazing! And this is now my job. This is the photo I was given for the 2006 card. There are two people NOT in my family in the photo who had to be taken out, six people MISSING from the photo, and my Uncle Dave was blinking. D’oh.

With a bit of patience, a little digital magic, and photos of everyone who was missing, VOILA! A whole new historical event! One where Uncle Dave didn’t blink and the WHOLE family made it to the party!

This year was even more challenging. There were TEN people missing from the photo. TEN.

This is Before:

And here is After:

I think we all look pretty good for being at an imaginary event!

Taking people out of or putting people back into photographs seems like such a simple thing now a days. With a tool like Photoshop and the right lighting, you can put yourself anywhere in the world! But people have been manipulating photographs almost as long as photography has existed. Just ask Nikolai Yezhov.

On August 11, I was honored to be the photographer for Maggie and Steve’s wedding reception in South Portland, Maine. Having been officially married exactly one week prior on the island of Samoa, this was the big party for friends and family back home who weren’t there for the real thing. It was a great party!

To see the full set of photos from this wonderful event, please visit my flickr site.

This is my friend Laura. I have known Laura since we were both 4 years old (yeah, that’s me asleep on her shoulder). For those keeping count, that is 25 years. This picture was taken in 1983, on the way back home from a trip to the Boston Children’s Museum (my family was living in Massachusetts at the time). It was a long ride, we’d had a fun day, and I was pooped. Seriously, how many five year olds do you know who would put up with letting someone sleep on them AT ALL let alone in a bumpy car? That is life long friend material right there.

Our families lived in the same neighborhood and we all became great friends. We used to take ski vacations together. On this one, in 1985, Laura gave me the chicken pox. It took me a long time to forgive that one.

My family moved away from Massachusetts in 1986. But Laura and I stayed in touch. This photo was taken in 1989 in a subway stop in Washington DC (we were showing off? maybe? who knows…). Laura’s mom and her future step-dad invited me a long with them on a business trip to DC. It was the first time I’d ever flown in a plane. And even though it had been a few years since we’d seen each other, we fell right back into step, as the best and easiest of friends do. As we grew, our trips to visit grew less and less frequent, but we always sort of knew where the other was and what they were up to.

In 2000, Laura married a wonderful man named Shane. And in 2001, they had a baby. A boy. Jackson.

This photo was taken in 2003, the very day I met Jackson for the first time. It’s such an amazing thing, meeting the next generation. Indescribable, really. It was also around this time they decided it was time to move to Maine (finally!). I was so thrilled to have my oldest friend back within a reasonable driving distance!

Less than a year later, their daughter, Abby, was born. And now I have TWO amazing new friends.

I get to play with them and watch them grow.

And see them change and blossom. Its hard to put into words how deeply cool I find all of this.

To get to photograph them and know them and know that I’ll be part of the things they remember from being little.

Such a gift.

This is just one of the many reasons I love what I do. I get to record life and watch it unfold all around me. I get to document some of the most important times in peoples lives. It is an honor and a privilege and just so much freaking fun. Especially when you get to do it for people you love.

To see more photos of Jackson and Abby, check out my flickr site. There are two sets, taken a year apart. Its amazing how much can change in just one little year. You can tell that in the second set, they are much more used to me and my camera. They had a very hard time staying serious and following any sort of directions from me. They just wanted to play! Not that I minded - on the contrary, I love just following them to see where they lead. Such imaginations on these two, I swear.

So thank you Laura, for continuing to be one of my dearest friends. In another 25 years, I’ll be photographing the kid’s weddings, telling stories of Abby screaming “TICKLE ME!” and Captain Jackson of Playground Rocket Ship Alpha, and posting photos of us with gray hair and relieved looks on our faces.