This is the repaired version of the overexposed photo I took of former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey--the 1968 Democratic Party's presidential nominee--in front of the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., September 9, 1975
When I made my first trip to Washington, D.C., in 1975 as a wide-eyed 17-year-old political junkie, I wandered around Capitol Hill in awe for a week, collecting autographs from political leaders and taking photos. One misty, cold afternoon, I exited the Capitol. As I walked down the path, I glanced off to the side and there was former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey—the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee who lost the presidency to Richard Nixon by an eyelash.
Humphrey was my political hero when I was a kid, and now here he stood—with no staff, no crowd, and no jostling photographers—as he did a street interview with a local Minnesota TV reporter.
I reached into my camera bag, yanked out my clunky 35mm camera that I didn't really know how to operate, tried to figure out the aperture settings on the fly, and snapped off maybe a dozen photos of HHH at close range before the mist turned to rain. Once the raindrops fell, HHH told the crew he needed to get inside. He handed back the clip-on microphone, turned on his heels, and jogged across the plaza and up the stairs of the Russell Senate Office Building.
Since I was standing right in front of him, just a few feet away, I knew I had taken some wonderful shots. Of course, this was decades before digital photography, when rolls of film had to be collected, sent to a processor, and prints returned days later for review. Imagine my profound disappointment when I returned home, developed the film, and saw that every frame was overexposed.
Now, 51 years later, through the magic of AI, I took one of my old Humphrey negatives, digitized it, explained to the ChatGPT program that the photo was overexposed, and asked it to fix it.
Voilà—the photo is so clear I almost feel I can reach through the computer screen and shake Hubert's hand. What an amazing difference. This was the photo I would have captured in 1975—had I known how to work that *&%$#@ camera!
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