apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

These photos exemplify the type of design that distinguishes homes from houses. Creative, lovely to look at and relative to the person who displays them.

I will take a room with a few simple pieces of furniture and more photos like this over carefully staged and generic MCM houses w/o any personality, any day.

Thank you for sharing your beautiful photos Victoria and reminding us what is at the heart of good design.

I did the same exact thing with some sepia pictures from a trip to Mammoth Lakes...I love it because you can change them out easily with new pics as needed...

Especially with the advent of photoshop, sepia has become one of those dreadful "aging" techniques that to me has become a bit of a no-no. Other than the fact that sepia, although romantic, usually means loss of whatever valuable information that the picture once showed (something that preservers should actually hate), it also looks very off when done artificially, like the hue is way too strong to really be convincing (if you look at color photos that started to turn sepia, not only does the photo turn yellowish, but the photo also loses details and clarity). Also, it reminds me of those tacky cards and posters with a sepia photograph with some sugary line written on it and a red rose.

It would probably be better to just put the photos in greyscale instead of using the sepia option. Or, if the color of your photograph is still pretty sharp, just leave it as it is. That's just me, and you can do whatever the hell you want with your photos, but black and white is more timeless and color is more authentic and better serves the purpose of "keeping memories."

I can understand having a heavily damaged/faded treasured photograph digitally restored by a professional. I can even understand scanning photos to archive them. But taking old family photographs and turning them into decorations by making them all look the same . . . I don't get it. It doesn't help that I hate faux-aged sepia digital photo processing.

If you print out your photos in sepia, you're only losing information on the print unless you don't keep the digital file as a record. I kind of dislike the technique for faking a natural process, and generally dislike fake material renditions of real things (recently commented on fake picket fence made of plastic where real wood would be genuine and preferred, as well as suggesting plastics be used more genuinely, as the malleable material it is).

However, in this case, I think people/purists! are inclined to regard the photograph as the final product in this design scheme.

Hanging on a wire as such, it probably only looks good in sepia and looks like crap in full color. It's a composition of "flavor" of artsy photog and casual that the sepia lends better than color; the same photos in color would beg the question, why haven't these been framed yet? What is up with this wire? Is this your locker?

In essence, this is most likely a temporary preference. I might not like it in my home, but among my objections to it wouldn't be that the printing technique ruins the actual record. I think each of us has some relative or specific tolerance/intolerance to faking things for effect, and the justification of calling it faux from time to time when you like something too much to follow your personal standards.

Aw. I thought the sepia was cheesy-but-cute.

Personally, I strongly disagree with somedudeinvicenza's suggestion that she fake black-and-white instead of sepia. I hate gray-scaled color photos. Sometimes I don't notice that they aren't honest-to-god black and white, but for the most part I can tell and I think it looks horrible. Real black and white has really amazing depth and details; gray-scaled photos generally just look flat and poorly exposed.

For those who are worried that information is lost when changing the original color photo to sepia, an easy solution is simply to save a digital copy for the record and then play with another copy for desired display effect. It seems to me that the purpose of these photographs is for display, not preservation. I can't imagine that preservationists would care if an image is sepia-ed as long as there is a backup digital copy. As an archivist and a lover of family photos, I think this is a wonderful idea and unique to the user. I would think of doing the same thing, as long as there are hard and digital copies of the original photo elsewhere. one of the wonderful purposes of photographs is to look at them, and I can't imagine that making a display photo sepia toned is going to lose so much information that it makes it useless to the user. Make sense?

When I say "lost information," I am referring more to the actual, natural process when photos turn sepia. Digitally rendering the photo sepia does not itself cause the photo to lose information, but to a video/film archivist, duplicating the process of decay romanticizes something that we should all abhor.

cola, I agree with you. Fake black and white lacks the detail and contrast that real black and white photos do. It's because black rendered as black is sharper than a lighter color (blues, reds, yellows, etc.) being rendered as black (it usually turns grey-ish). But personally, that's better than yellow.