Can anybody identify the year/model of the Harley in this photo? It's a picture of my mom's biological father when he worked as a motorcycle police officer in Indianapolis sometime after he came home from WWII. You should be able to click the image for a larger version.
I'm planning to print this onto canvas as a Christmas gift for my mom, and I wanted to include some text with his name, the department, the motorcycle, etc.
FYI, the image is a scan of a black and white 8x10 photo. I colorized it using the My Heritage "deep learning" AI tool, so the colors of details on the bike may not necessarily be accurate. However, I was pretty impressed with the results. It rendered his pants navy blue and his uniform shirt light blue, which would seem to be accurate. And the color of the bricks on the building behind him certainly seems reasonable. Something in the coloring of the bushes looks a bit suspect to me, but all in all I was very impressed. It was basically a one-click operation to colorize it. But here's how the photo originally looked:
I wish I had some backstory for the photo, but unfortunately we don't have any details. My mother grew up with a step-father, and only has memories of her biological father as a little girl when he would come visit her, usually while working. He died in 1959 at the age of 42, so she did not really get a chance to know him. She recently connected with a half-sister she did not grow up with, and she was able to borrow this photo long enough to scan it.
The photo looks staged to me, possibly with off-camera lighting, so I wonder if it was something for a newspaper, or some kind of official department photo op. And the 8x10 has a lot of detail, so I'm guessing it was taken with a decent camera.
Last edited by Edgar_in_Indy; 12-13-2020 at 12:47 AM.