Choosing the
photograph for the order of service.
Most families have more photographs than they realise. The work of choosing the right one is harder than the restoration that follows. A short note for families planning a service this month.
When a family writes to us in the week before a service, the message is almost always the same: "We have photographs. We have so many photographs. We don't know which one."
Choosing is the hardest part. Below is what we've learned watching families do it.
Choose the photograph she'd recognise of herself.
Not the photograph from her wedding day, unless she carried it for sixty years. Not the photograph her grandchildren took at the seaside, unless that was a place she returned to in conversation. Choose the photograph she would have recognised herself in — the one she kept in the front room, or the one she pointed to in the album when she told the story.
If she lived alone, look on her mantel, in her bedroom, in the wallet she carried. The photograph she chose to live with is almost always the right one for the easel.
A close portrait beats a group photograph.
For the order of service, a photograph where her face is at least a third of the frame works best. Group photographs (a wedding, a Christmas in 1973) make for better slideshow material but tend to crop poorly to the cover of an A5 programme.
If the only good photograph you have is a group one, send it anyway — we can crop and restore the central figure while keeping the family context visible in the slideshow.
Damage isn't a problem. Tone is.
A photograph with a long crease through the middle, foxing on the corners, and water damage on one edge is still a workable hero photograph. We can restore those.
What we can't fix as easily is tone — a photograph where her expression doesn't match the person the family remembers. If the only sharp photograph you have is one where she looks tired, anxious, or "not herself," consider whether a softer or slightly damaged photograph that captures her better is the right choice instead.
If you have three days.
Send us two or three candidate photographs in the first email — a rough phone scan of each is enough. We'll reply within a few hours with which one we'd restore as the hero, what we'd do to it, and what the timeline looks like.
For services within six days, we have a rush path that compresses the standard timeline. We'll be honest about whether we can hold the quality bar — and if we can't, we'll point you to a faster alternative.
For the slideshow.
The hero photograph is for the programme cover and the easel. The slideshow that plays during the reception or wake works differently. Twelve to twenty supporting photographs, restored as a set, run through with quiet music — that's the Memorial Bundle. We build it around the hero you chose.
If you are planning a service this month, write to hello@keptandkin.com and put the service date in the subject. We answer the same day.