The Road Home by Ford Michael Thomas

Author:Ford, Michael Thomas [Ford, Michael Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp
Published: 2011-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

“Damn it. These are messed up, too.”

Burke set the photos on the dining room table. They had arrived from the printer twenty minutes earlier. Because he had shot in color and couldn’t easily develop the film himself, he had sent it to his favorite processing lab in Boston, the one that always did a stellar job. The prints had arrived with a note from the lab technician saying that they’d done the best that they could.

Not that the images were bad. They were beautiful. But in each one there was not one but two areas of blur. Oblong in shape, they disrupted the landscape of the photos like twin pillars of cloud. In one of Burke’s favorite photos, a shirtless Will was standing in front of the low stone wall, his face turned toward the camera. But behind him and to the left, as if looking over his shoulder, were the two smudges of gray.

The rest of the shots were equally marred. Unusable. Burke thumbed through them again, annoyed at the results. He had to remind himself that he was shooting with old cameras, and that if he wanted flawless pictures, he would have to either clean them or use more modern technology. Perhaps he would go back to the site and take some shots with one of his digital cameras. It was such a beautiful place that it was a shame to have wasted so much time and film on imperfect pictures.

It occurred to him that he might be able to fix some of the images using photo-correction software. Along with the prints and developed negatives, the lab had sent him the pictures on a CD. He took this and put it into his computer. Opening the software, he selected the image of Will and imported it into the program. It appeared on the screen, much reduced in size. Burke focused on the cloudy areas and enlarged that area of the photo in order to better see what might be done. He didn’t like manipulating his work this way, but if he could salvage the pictures, it might be worth it.

He increased the overall size of the image to twenty-four by twenty-four inches. On his laptop screen he was able to see only a small portion of the photo, so that the picture appeared as a mosaic of colored blocks. He wished he had the large monitor on his computer at home, which would have made things much easier. As it was, he had to move the image around until the cloudy areas were in the frame.

When he found them, his fingers froze over the keyboard. There was Will’s shoulder, the freckles on his skin clearly visible in their magnified state. And behind his shoulder two faces looked directly into the camera. Indistinct, as if shot through water, they were nonetheless faces. Burke could make out eyes and mouths, although they were mostly shadow, and within the blur of gray the outlines of two bodies were visible.

With a few more clicks, he called up the black-and-white images he had taken with the Yashica-Mat.

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