JH Williams – Yosemite

John Healy Williams – Yosemite National Park

Photos of Yosemite National Park and surrounding areas by Rev. John Healy Williams (my great-great-grandfather) taken around 1900. He is pictured is some of the photos, as is his wife Annie Frances (Day) Williams (my great-great-grandmother). The originals are black and white 3 3/4” x 4 3/4” roll film which is very thin, permanently curled, and extremely fragile. Frames on the inside of the negative roll were better preserved than those on the outside of the roll which exhibited significant light fading and damage. The film was very hard to work with, but the quality is still remarkably good.

The negatives were digitized using a Fujifilm X-T3 (26 mega-pixel) digital camera on a copy stand, with negatives on a light table. Images were processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The Photo Restoration neural filter in Photoshop was especially helpful to remove artifacts from dust and deterioration.