Collecting Vernacular Photography | Hacker News Reader

Collecting Vernacular Photography

thomashawk.com

75 pointsmikewarot14 comments

Wasn’t this guy the original Zooomr[1]? He’s been at it a while…

His find here is somewhat reminiscent of the Maloof’s Vivian Meier’s trove, though not as significant or large.

In any event if you’re on Flickr groups there will be the occasional upload of similar vernacular photograph trove finds. Someone after retiring goes on a cross country trip (sometimes with their SO) takes their 35mm along and do a little Robert Frank interpretation of the journey.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooomr

> Maloof’s Vivian Meier’s trove

One of the best documentaries I have ever seen, but I also admittedly have an interest in art, design and photography. The books collecting her work are great too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er8-Vq__cRE

I have a large collection of my own and others photos, and this seems like a good direction to take with them as well. I wonder how many of us here on HN have huge collections of our own photos and wonder what to do with them.

I have boxes of family photos, negatives, slides and films.

I wonder how to convert the reels and reels of super 8mm stuff - which seems to include sound.

telecine transfer, i think it's called. you need an 8mm projector with a lens that will let it project on to a "full frame" semi-opaque screen about 12-24" away, and then you use a digital camera to record the other side of the screen. Audio can be passed straight through to a recorder or PC.

I have an epson photograph scanner, i bought it in lieu of a flatbed because i had around 12,000 photographs to scan, and scanning the prints seemed to be easier than the negatives. Negative scanners (not flatbed) are expensive and had poor reviews around the internet when i looked. I originally experimented with scanning both the photos and the negatives with a flatbed, but the amount of work to get individual images was crazy. The little epson scanner is so easy to use that my wife took over and scanned and "named/dated" all the resultant digital images.

I've mentioned this a few times, but no one has offered to let us scan their old photos. Maybe i should put a flyer up somewhere.

I found a service, on amazon of all places, to do a film-to-digital conversion. I thought it was worth the money, and they sent back the original media and all that. In better shape than I sent it, actually--I was charged 3 bucks for a repair to a VHS tape, which was transferred flawlessly.

I have about 1000 slides awaiting to be digitized. They were taken by my parents in the 1970s.

I have a huge collection of my father's photo collection (about 10000 images on negatives and positives). He is photographer (as I'm) so there should be easthetic value too. We have Epson 850 Pro for digitalisation but it is incredibly time consuming, so actually expensive if done in free time.

A recent, related discussion on the Library of Congress’s efforts to identify people and objects in their photo collections.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33008376

I have a hard enough time using/publishing my own photographs. I am impressed by people who add other peoples work into their workflow. And even more so when it is analog photographs that require a substantial amount of work before publishing.

But great effort!

This seems to dovetail nicely with the recent thread about the old Usenet post that was found talking about the Trojan exploit. In response to that post, someone mentioned the possibility of the emerging field of software archaeology in the future. In the same way, I think we will see some kind of archaeology of photography come out of these old photo collections. It might even rewrite history.

I’d love to hear more detail about the keywording process involved and the workflow there. Does the scanner software have some very manual tagging UI into the exif data, etc?

> Keywording is one of my least favorite parts of collecting. It’s boring, it’s monotonous, it’s time consuming… but, keywording is the key to organizing my collection and to making it more searchable in its new digital life.

The blogpost author suggests Flickr. I wish there was something better than that.

I've uploaded similar stuff, in much smaller amounts, to Wikimedia Commons (but it's limited to stuff that's out of copyright).

It's just that I don't find the Flickr corporation trustworthy enough to be treated like a knowledge archive.

If you like this, check out Beijing Silvermine on Instagram

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