KAMPHOEFNER Family Archive

I began scanning photos from my dad's collection and moved on to grandma and grandpa's. Scanning at any appreciable quality is a slow, painstaking process - but it has been rewarding to complete. Many photos are scanned from slides and negatives, and I'll be adding more as time permits.

The user account permissions allow photos to be seen according to the family to which the user belongs. For example, everyone can see the Fred Kamphoefner family photos, but only the Ed Kamphoefner family accounts can see photos of a dog we had in 1995. I presume these would be of little interest to the extended family. Contact me if you would like your own private family section for uploading.

The majority of these are scanned on an Epson Perfection V370 photo scanner that is capable of scanning negative images, slides, and printed photos. In general, all negatives and slides are scanned at 2400 dpi, and all printed photos at 600 dpi. In my testing, I found little improvement in the quailty of the images at higher resolutions, and there must be some time/file size comprimise made.

Unless you plan to blow these up to a poster size, these settings will be more than adequate. I found very little degradation from the often-poor originals to the scanned images. I ran an automated color restoration on most photos, and completed some Photoshop cleanup of certain images, but many could still use restoration work. These tasks are easily completed on an as-needed basis.

The site is being served via only the most high-tech methods available: a old computer I keep in my garage. I've owned the kamphoefner.com domain for years, so this was a quick and easy way to serve it up and give the domain a real purpose. The low volume of traffic doesn't warrant any real hosting solution or expense, and my immediate family has tested the site without issue.

Fortunately, the photos are backed up both redundantly at my house, as well as in the Amazon cloud. I looked into several ways to display the photos, but none gave me the combination of security, privacy, and commentary that I wanted. Creating this site gave me much more control. Don't fret, however: if you want to bulk-download all the images to keep, just send me an email and I'll send you a link.