HOME |
RSS | 
I really grok Michael Williams’ motivation for this project. I have a pair of comfortable leather shoes that I’ve worn almost every day for the past five years. I’ve done both office work and manual labor in them and they’ve held up amazingly well. Williams has had a lifelong love affair with Red Wing 875s, a classic American work boot design now over one hundred years old. When his most recent pair wore out, he sent them back to the factory for restoration. The workers kindly took photographs of every step of the process. You can view them at the link.
Link -via American Digest
If you browse reddit, you may have noticed that when someone posts a very old picture of a relative, someone always restores and colorizes it as a gift to the submitter. A lot of these amazing photo restorations are done by Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway. She has also colorized many historic photographs.
Dullaway recently started her own business in restoring old photographs, but the website is still under construction. But there are other places to see her work. Link to reddit album. Link to Dullaway’s Flickr stream. -Thanks, özi!
(Images credit: Sanna Dullaway)
Bob Rosinsky was asked to restore a tintype photograph from the 19th century. On his blog, he walks us through the process of how he did it. No, we don’t watch him change every pixel, but you’ll be surprised at the difference between a scanner image of the tintype and a photograph using an ultra-high resolution camera with a macro lens. Here, you see the before-and-after pictures. Link -via Boing Boing
The accepted belief is that once destroyed, tropical rain forests could never be restored. But is that really the case or just a myth?
In 1993, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences at Cornell University began replanting a parcel of worn-out Costa Rican pasture land with seeds collected from native trees found in the community, often racing to gather the seeds before the monkeys got to them.
The result? Many people thought that they had done the impossible:
Ten years after the tree plantings, Cornell graduate student Jackeline Salazar counted the species of plants that took up residence in the shade of the new planted areas. She found remarkably high numbers of species — more than 100 in each plot. And many of the new arrivals were also to be found in nearby remnants of the original forests. [...]
Fully rescuing a rain forest may take hundreds of years, but Leopold, whose findings are published with Salazar in the March 2008 issue of Ecological Restoration, said the study’s results are promising. “I’m surprised,” he said. “We’re getting impressive growth rates in the new forest trees.”
Link – via holeinthedonut
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
