I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.
Aren't they in Oslo?
That seems quite specific. How do you tell?
From what I see it's probably not winter (lack of snow), not autumn (lack of leaves on the ground). But that still leaves a pretty long time period with a bigger range of temperatures.
Apparently the average temperature in 1890 was 1.3 C colder than it is now.
Source: Born and living in Oslo.
Well, that's fairly short by U.S. standards, at least when counting 20+ C weather, which in many states is nearly 6 months of the year, with summer heat lasting well through September in many places.
Even places south of Norway, like Netherlands, still considered pretty far north for many in the world, have relatively 'short' summers as well.
https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/s...
Suits are always too many layers
Also even the framerate is often wrong as these old movies didn't have consistent framerates. They were hand cranked so the framerate varied quite a bit.
The background for the regulation was the switch from unregulated wood buildings to requiring mainly brick as building material - there were some major fires before using bricks became the law.
I live just around the corner from one of the photos - the building in that photo hasn't changed much since back then.
The actual noise levels may have been higher. Regardless, I think the main reason is ventilation. With coal and wood heating streets were designed to act as valleys pushing air through. Also, I hard that old European cities were built with airflow in mind. Whole streets were uninterrupted with trees while some have them.
Also I heard an opinion that Wrocław is one of the most polluted cities because it got a lot of new buildings that break the airflow on main streets.
But there is green lining added to the river at least. That river looked very sad in 1902.
Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.
But the technical basis was definitely on top of the game at the time, under the given conditions.
Smiling for photographs is a social behavior that took time to catch on.
Perhaps this persisted as habit even after the development of colloidal photography?
Yeah, I am even now a little suspicious of the photos authenticity for this reason.
Source: Among other things, I've sat for a tintype portrait before. https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/photo
I think the reason is different, because even I, as a kid in the early 1980s, was taken to a photo shop for "official shots", well dressed and told to behave. It was a bit unnatural, yes. People in staged shots are generally a little stiff.
However, you're incorrect about the lack of usage in the timeframe specified: "Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype
Besides, the GP comment referred to the era, to which I was responding.
Your explanation is not without merit, however: "One common explanation for the lack of smiles in old photos is that long exposure times — the time a camera needs to take a picture — made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible. That way, the picture wouldn't look blurry." — https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs
(Also, photography was invented in the 19th century. I'm not sure why you make such sweeping claims about a whole century when exposures went from taking hours to fractions of a second over the course of it.)
https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-trad...