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Virginia Woolf photographic portraits made by George Charles Beresford in 1902.

Virginia Woolf as a young woman

Virginia Woolf - 1902 - My idealized cleaned photo.

The images which were available on the web were all contaminated with various forms of detritus. So I spent several hours cleaning these up with digital photo shop to see something closer to my idealization of what Virginia looked like in the originals. The second photo seems to not to have been shot at the same instant but on the same camera a few seconds later because it has a slightly different viewing angle which can be seen on the eyebrow to the left . Multilens cameras had been used in early portrait photography because of the difficulty of making copy prints so if you can get two of them you can get nice stereo pictures. But, that’s not the case in this pair.

Virginia Woolf - 1902 portrait

A portrait of Virginia Woolf from a very slightly different angle obviously taken within seconds of the other photo but not stereo. Also she has turned her eyes downward a little.

On close observation it appears that the top photo has been stretched horizontally. Which gives her a strange alien appearance, I mean outer space alien. The bottom photo with her looking at the horizon lo0ks more like a college coed. I know what I feel when I say this but I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.

It is difficult to get all of the random artifacts out of some of these old photos. Lots of things are easier to cope with than the general blochiness of the original web photos I was working with so I spent a lot of time removing the obvious artifacts manually before doing any of the easy automatic operations. The procedures in this case ended up looking a little more like oil paintings because of the computers over-handling of the digital noise. It was especially noticable in the hair. These pictures can be seen in higher resolution by clicking on them.

Virginia Woolf from cover of A Writer's Deary

Virginia Woolf from - A Writers Diary

This picture is cleaned up from the cover of A Writer’s Diary
available from Amazon.com

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I didn’t go out today because I supposedly have a cold. In fact if I hadn’t told anyone it would be impossible to tell because I have zero symptoms. This is 48 hours after I had a fever of 100°+F. I did go to the Med yesterday and only those people who had read my blog asked me how I was feeling because even only 24 hours after the fever I was okay. Not 100% but okay. Today I have been 98.6% okay, not perfect but I have to observe very carefully to notice anything whatsoever. Part of my cure the flu with hot baths procedure is to take a bath for two more days after the last symptoms have gone away. I had an experience or two in the past when I quit taking them the instant the symptoms abated and the flu came back a couple of days later with renewed force. The baths are not unpleasant so it is just an hour of lollygagging about.