Depression-era color photos
blogs.denverpost.com
blogs.denverpost.com
"An unemployed hipster tweeting from his iPhone outside a shuttered financial firm. New York, New York, April 2010. Reproduction from JPEG. Photo by Jack Smith. Holographic Storage Division, Library of Congress."
I wonder if our grandchildren will view our still, color photos the same way. Life was so drab and depressing before motion & 3D!
Wait -- you mean they had sunlight during the depression?!
I also look at #9 and thank my stars that I am culturally allowed to do manual work in jeans and boots.
On a side note, the locomotives reminded me of the visual imagery that crossed my mind while reading Atlas Shrugged.
Exactly what I thought when I saw them. These images are great and would do great as a coffee table book to flip through while reading Atlas Shrugged.
Just an observation.
Maybe cities are different, or maybe DC is.
I guess that the people in the pictures would, very nearly, be statistically as fat as we are had they access to the same food and leisure. I think a lot has changed about our culture since then, but I don't suppose the amount of self-control that people possess has decreased significantly, if at all. This to me would be the more interesting discussion than whether or not we are fatter than people from the depression, which is clear. Certainly our marketing culture is responsible for much of the overeating that occurs now. But what about the people themselves? Does a depression era person have a smaller or larger reserve of self-control, and would they bother to allot a portion of it to weight-control? I think we would agree that people are more selfish these days. Whether people are less able to set and achieve goals is a another question. Is a given adult more or less capable of keeping his hand out of the treat jar?
The original comment speaks volumes in its terseness, so I will lay it out: the comment poses that people now are less capable of controlling themselves than they were back then. (The alternatives: to indict the role of food in our culture, or to celebrate our improved capacity for producing food, are not what it is intended.) If so, then I would like to see that demonstrated.
As a side discussion to poke fun at the negative implications of the statement: If obese people enjoyed a legally protected status (as many other minorities do), would you still feel compelled to make the same comment? What might a discussion protecting obese people look like?
Maybe this was before the convention of, "Say cheese!"
Or more likely, I suspect, because life was hard and people had little.
Makes one appreciate how good we have it now.
</adjusts air conditioning> </shifts butt in Aeron> </grabs Red Bull>
I encountered this clash of cultures when I came to America from Eastern Europe. Everyone looking at my family photos immediatly assumed everyone was very unhappy because the subjects don't smile. I usually got the "Oh so sad, everyone was so unhappy, it was probably because of communism...?". Nevermind that it is a picture of a large family picnic, with plenty of food, kabobs grilling in the background -- basically all the indications that everyone was having a good time (and I know they were because I was there as well). Yet, I always get the "unhappy people" sympathy comment. It always baffles me...
Some specifics from photo.net:
http://photo.net/black-and-white-photo-film-processing-forum...
From various Kodak publications of the period, recommended exposures in the 1920's on "normal" film would indicate a "modern" ASA rating of 25-50 with normal developement. The sensitivity of generally available films seems to have increased in the early 1930's and higher speed emulsions became also available.
Since there are readers here who may have never seen film: ASA 50 is considered on the very slow, insensitive side today. ASA 200 is typical, and ASA 400+ is fast.
Slow film speeds inevitably lead to larger apertures or slower shutter speeds or both. The brightness of lenses is limited which means that the shutter speed (which you can take up to years with pinhole cameras if you really want to) has to do all the heavy lifting and exposure times can quickly get out of hand.
A little example: Say you are shooting with ASA 25 film and your light-meter tells you that, given your aperture, you need a shutter speed of 15 seconds. (You would get values in this range at dusk or inside at night with a normal lightbulb illuminating the room.) To bring that down to a more manageable quarter second (you will still need a tripod but capturing smiles might be quite a bit easier) you would need crazy fast ASA 1600 film (only to give you a sense of perspective on that: you could buy the first ASA 1000 color film only in 1982).
This is actually one area where digital photography handily beats film. A fancy and expensive digital camera like the Nikon D3S will let you shoot photos up to ISO 102400 (for the purpose of this comment let ISO = ASA) which will bring your shutter speed down from a quarter second to 1/256 of a second. Well, those ISO 102400 photos will look like crap, but you will get usable results up to ISO 12800 [+] (that would be 1/32 of a second, you could even pull that one off handheld if you really tried). Unthinkable with film. That’s the reason why digital point and shoots can get away with fairly insensitive minuscule sensors.
Long story short: You mom is absolutely correct when she says that shutter speeds were slow. The reason for that were slow films which cause slow shutter speeds (given a fixed aperture).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/721576...
You see a lot of this style of handwriting pre-WWII, then it disappears. What changed?
I've got that on my things-to-do after this summer...
For all we know, the next generation will think back on us 2010-folk and think "could you believe it took 5 hours to cross the country by plane?!"
http://gizmodo.com/5254222/olde-timey-notificator-machine-tw...
Not exactly the same (only work themed photos, international) but offers some additional perspective.
Given that URL I thought I'd see some flickr-style years-in-the-future Expires and Cache-control headers. The article is dated July 26, but 1281011079 (assuming this is an 'epoch time') is today, August 5. It's almost like they went out of their way to defeat caches by tacking on that query string.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
They were constructed due to the photographer foresight of using different lens filters.
Some very neat photos in there though, and interesting to see the world/country in a different phase.
is that snow in new mexico?! is that normal there?
I'll bet you didn't know that it also snows at the Grand Canyon. I've seen it.