Announcement
Because I have had many questions about the "Memo" being held in the hand
of General Roger Ramey in a picture taken in his office on July 8, l947,
by
J. Bond Johnson, I have decided to make available for a nominal
fee a
CD ROM with a great deal of relevant information . My goal is to
enlist the
help of as many analysts as possible so that a concensus might be
reached
as to just what words are on the "memo."
The CD ROM includes high resolution scans of the following items:
1. The memo portion of an 11"x14" print of the picture obtained earlier
this year from U. of Texas, Arlington, Archives.
2.The memo portion of an 8"x10" print that I obtained 20 years ago
from the
Ft. Worth Star Telgram long before the negative was handled a lot.
3. An 8"x10" print of roughly just the memo portion made for me a few
months ago by UTA. It is the equvalent of the memo portion of a
print
roughly 55" x70".
4. The Original 4"x5" negative was scanned in its entirety, and with very
high resolution (about 8300ppi...no interpolation on the scans of the
negative),
back and front, of the memo portions. The scans were done by an
imaging
outfit in Dallas. It cost me $250. just to have the UTA carry the
negative
and remain with it while it was being scanned. and an addtional
$250.
for the scans, the CD ROMs, Fed ex etc. I am very grateful to
Victor
Golubic of Phoenix for locating the imaging company and
discussing the scans with them.
My colleague is Rob Belyea, owner and operator of ProLab here in
Fredericton,
New Brunswick Canada, one of the top 10 labs in Canada. He has
been
in the business for more than 30 years. He has compiled all the scans
with
additional materials (including work in progress) on a CD ROM
having
about 188MB.
By the way my very competent associate Rob Belyea, who is rather
busy running a company, suggested I warn those interested in
this problem "not to waste time on compressed images. Just use
.psd, .tif, .bmp, .png, or any vector mapped metafile like .cgm
Don't use .jpg, .jpe, .jpeg, .lzw or any compression that
results in change to the original. Jpeg and similar routines use
some slick math to turn huge arcs and circles, with millions of
data points, into fewer and fewer tangents. After repeated passes
a circle becomes a square..."
This is one of the reasons we are offering the CD-ROM with all
the scans on it so that people won't have to compress poorer
files and send them on the internet. The CDROM has about 188MB.
The CD ROM is available for US25$ or equivalent in
Canadian $
or English pounds. Send check or money order to
Stan Friedman
POB 958
Houlton, ME 04730
if you live in the USA. All others use
79 Pembroke
Crescent
Fredericton
NB Canada E3B 2V1
The price includes shipping and handling.Let the chips fall where they
may. Neil Morris, Bond J. and Debbie Stock have already been sent their
Cd-ROMs.
Regards Stan Friedman
A NOTE FROM ROB BELYEA
Hi... there were several scans under investigation when Stan
asked me for a CD to send out... All the raw stuff is there, but
there is a lot of extra info available to anyone interested in working
with these images. A couple of the files are pre-filtered to speed
up the process of cleaning up the noise/grain/base junk and to
provide a starting point.
Checking some of the info from other sites, the question of
resolution
from prints or negatives or scans appears confused. A very high res
scan from an 8X10 print can't come close to the detail obtained
from a clean, regular res scan from an enlargement such as the
detail 8X10 of the memo cropped from an enlargement of 55+ inches
wide from the original 4X5 B&W neg.. Anyone who has ever printed
negatives knows that an 8X10 contains only a small amount of info
from the original compared with a 55X80 or a scan of the negative..
Regards Rob
BACK
EMAIL RON REGEHR