An abandoned cabinet full of Kodachrome slides in San Francisco
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That’s gotta be the biggest swimming pool I’ve seen. I was born in ‘74 (hello, fellow Gen X-er) and we went to various public pools through the summer. The biggest was an “olympic sized” pool 20min driving distance from our house - and this one looks double that from the camera’s perspective.
But I remember the thrill of swimming to the centre of the pool and being away from everything. It felt like a real achievement and a little unsafe but in a good way.
I suppose it wasn't easy to maintain and not as "safe".
It actually is closer to the reflecting pool than an Olympic pool
- Olympic pool: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-size_swimming_pool - Reflecting pool: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Memorial_Reflecting_... - Fleishhacker pool: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleishhacker_Pool
300x50 meters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutro_Baths
It's a bummer there's nothing like these places there today.
The US swimming Olympic tryouts were held there in 1924 and 1952.
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101893972/why-arent-there-mor...
And "for a century" is historically incorrect and revisionist, if you were actually talking about racism, which I don't believe you were.
What was the real point you were trying to make? It sounds to me you're offering "NIMBY", which has nothing to do with race, as an alternative theory to counter the parent's point that it's actually racism, which is extremely well documented and not legitimately contested, and has been going on for a lot longer than a century.
Are you literally saying people don't want swimming pools in their back yards? Really??! That's news to me. Or is it actually that they don't want black people in their public swimming pools? That's not what "NIMBY" means, but mutually exclusively exactly what "racism" means.
Compare that to Kitsilano Pool in Canada. It was consistently repaired and upgraded over time, a fact well documented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsilano_Pool
At 6,7m gallons (25k cubic meters) volume it was a bit larger and freshwater. The big deal about it was that it was used year round in Moscow. It was quite the experience to swim in it in the winter at -15C. -20C was the official operating limit.
A different person found three, but only took one.
Follow-up: https://www.sfchronicle.com/vault/article/san-francisco-phot...
> Donnie Weaver, an artist who works with preschoolers, saw the shiny cabinets curbside and stopped short.
> “I thought, ‘Oh, what a cool box! ’ ” he remembered. “Because I like stuff from that era. I picked it up without really looking inside, opened it up when I got home, and thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
> Weaver later ran back with a wheelie cart — the cabinets weighed about 15 pounds each — but the other two boxes were gone.
As the old saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." The problem seems to be uniting those two people.
- Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the crap out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)
- Ebay is full of scam artists and hucksters
So... the problem persists.
In my experience listing your stuff for even a couple of dollars greatly reduces this problem. If I want to get rid of something on craigslist for free I just put it on the curb and post the address.
A couple hundred sales later and I’ve only had one problem. eBay sided with me on it, to my surprise.
Maybe don’t list one-off priceless family heirlooms on eBay, but it’s actually quite good for moving a lot of random products in my experience.
I just moved cross country and was downsizing, so we put a bunch of stuff up on Marketplace, some free, some for money. The hardest part was communicating dimensions despite listing them specifically. People would show up with a compact SUV (CR-V/RAV4/etc.) to pick up a couch. I just shook my head. I would take about 3 pictures, no editing, write a 2 sentence description, put in the dimensions (if appropriate for the item) and generally within a day have it gone.
Note that I wasn't trying to make money, I just wanted to get rid of things, but that's probably not much different than CL, but could be different than listing things on ebay.
It's still probably not worth it time wise, but the stuff I was getting rid of was still in good shape and could be useful to somebody, so I'd prefer to have somebody get some use out of it instead of just throwing it away.
Some meth head probably took the shelves to the scrap yard for a couple bucks after dumping the slides illegally by the side of the road somewhere.
You are off by few decades though. 35mm film photography and cinematography was still dominating until the end of 90s. Nikon D1 and Canon 1D were released in 1999 and 2001 respectively, and Star Wars EP2 in 2002 was notably first major movie recorded with digital cameras. Pleasantville (1998) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) were early examples of using digital intermediates.
We do have thriller in 4k, other productions too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnqjkJTMaA.
Now those are interesting examples of digital cameras you provide above; definitely worth sharing and bringing to the table.
Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too? Like how exactly were TV shows broadcast anyways now that I think about it. The Abba remastered stuff is where my association got set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrGuyw1V8s, that stuff is incredible.
The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked because their analog version of deinterlacing 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second matched European film.
But, in the US, where TV ran at 60 fields per second, filming it at 30fps was just too short of an exposure time. So video was favored in the US.
A lot of pre-digital stuff was shot on film for various reasons. One reason is that 24/25fps film adapts very well to 50 fields per second or 60 frames per second; the consequence is a very minor speedup / slowdown. In contrast, it's a lot harder to adapt video between the two framerates with analog technologies.
Edit: I also suspect cost may have had something to do with it. I suspect that film was cheaper than video in the 1970s, but someone who was around at the time might understand the cost difference between video versus film.
I don't know if anyone "anticipated" HDTV in the 1970s, but back then artists did like putting their videos up on a big projected screen. At least in the 1990s, a lot of content, like Seinfeld and Friends, was done on film; both for the look, and so that it could be remastered for HDTV.
In the US, HDTV came out in the mid 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television#Ina...
It's not "deep" that producers at the time anticipated that re-runs would be broadcast on HDTV. In the 1990s, a lot of producers preferred the look of film over video; or even considered it a better overall medium.
There have been innumerable collections of things that other collectors or historians would kill for that have been lost because they seem like junk to the people that inherit it. I have ended up collecting vacuum tubes and I almost weep at stories of warehouses of them being junked. There have been plenty of other things like comic books, LPs, cameras, etc. that faced a similar fate. And while I would never argue that collections of these things are all that important in the grand scheme of things collecting is fun and brings enjoyment. If nothing else selling them can bring in a few bucks.
Losing historic pictures is just tragic. Any given historical image could prove to be important in some sort of research.
(For example, "sell it at ___, and expect ___ money". Or "email ___ at ___ museum/archive, who would like it as a donation someday". Or "if you're up for it, post this prepared inventory list to enthusiast forum ___, and flip a coin on which respondent to give it to".)
This not only means you can enjoy it until the end, but that you don't have to guess/decide when is the right time. You can draft easy instructions/inventory now, and occasionally update them, over hopefully many decades.
Also in my experience the best collections are for the love of it - collectors often don't care about the value and often don't even know the value. They might care about rareness or uniqueness but not $$$ directly.
Also the value of many collections is unknown until far in the future.
My uncle (Uncle Bill) was fascinated with actors and ended up being good friends with a lot. He took pics and slides for years and years and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked for them. Well before he died he packed up a significant portion of his collection and sent them off. After he died, we gathered more and sent them out.
Now that my mother is moving in with me and we are cleaning out, yet again, and packing, I've found more slides. Some were from Uncle Bill and others were from my father's side of the family. I had never seen them before. Kinda cool, but not something to keep. So I bundled them up with several other items and off to the historical society they went. Over the past three years, I've shipped probably 10 boxes of all manner of stuff. Family bibles, mortgages, pictures, diaries, correspondence, etc. I've been told that some students have been helping catalog and have found the diaries and correspondence, in particular, interesting. What they were reading was written by my aunt (who married a professor of philosophy and member of the International Red Cross) as she traveled with my uncle, Colonel, around the world.
So glad they are being taken care of and are of interest to at least a few.
You are the best person to find a recipient for your collection. Do it while you still have your wits. Strongly consider having the transfer made while you are still alive, so it doesn't have to go through probate. Don't let your heirs maintain unrealistic expectations of how much they could get for selling the stuff.
++ again for this.
Imagine (with some irony): The easiest items for others to pick out -- aside from the occasional curiosity -- might be the most ordinary, recognizable, and commonly-usable items, which is to say also available in stores.
It can be liberating and instructive to assume it will all go to the curb or the trash upon your passing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak
The Smarter Every Day YouTuber did a three part series about their factory in Rochester, NY:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XXcmtNSUxoa...
I have watched one part of Smarter Every Day's videos on Kodak. Thanks for linking!
> Ms. Evans, who was a Kodak janitor in the early 1980s before her rise to executive there and at other leading firms like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, recalls a different experience.
> “One thing about Eastman Kodak is they believed in their people,” said Ms. Evans, now chief information officer at Mercer, the human resources consulting giant. “It was like a family. You always had someone willing to help open a door if you demonstrated that you were willing to commit to growing your skills and become an asset that was valuable for the company.”
Also, since the price of color negative films are slowly rising, some enthusiasts use Kodak Vision-based films (which is based on cinema film).
There's a documentary about the last Kodachrome roll developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUL6MBVKVLI . Very sad.
And slide film never had great dynamic range.
Similar depth of field is obtainable for a similar price, at least on 35mm. MF is really expensive on digital.
But that color. Ohhhh that color.
That would require about ~200MP Bayer.
Thats hard to do with digital.
Then again, that's not really practical for storing and transmitting an image!
As for Kodachrome's legacy, there's a 2017 movie of the eponymous title starring Ed Harris. While not a documentary, it's still worth seeing.
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day
Always like KC 25 a lot more than the colors of Fuji's Velvia which while nominally ISO 50 was really about the same effective speed.
Velvia was another film stock that seemed to have an outsized personality.
First, don't ever throw your slides or film negatives away as you may need them again (if you're sure you'll never want them again then give them to relatives or failing that to those who collect and archive old photos). If you have scanned them then pack them away sealed from dust, dirt, high humidity and high temperatures.
Second, if you are scanning negatives or slides then never skimp on the resolution, if you do and you no longer have the originals you can't rescan them for more detail (the large size of high resolution scans is not an issue these days). The classic error many make is they scan say a school or army platoon photo at low or medium resolution and it looks OK on the screen, later when they have to select an individual from the group and need to enlarge the image it's too pixelated to use. (It's very disconcerting for say a family who has lost a soldier in war and they can't recover his photo.)
A Kodachrome slide under good conditions has a limiting resolution of around 100 lines/mm and a 35mm negative or slide is 24x36mm which means the scanned image has to have at least a horizontal resolution of 3600 pixels to extract all the picture information. 100 lines/mm resolution means you need set your scanner to at least 2500 px per inch. In fact, ideally you should scan at double that rate to allow for the Nyquist factor—like your audio CDs which sample at 44kHz to get 20kHz audio reproduction, you should do the same with photo scans. Sometimes, scanning at the Nyquist rate (here, 5000 px per inch) can be difficult so you should set the scanner to as high resolution as is practicable).
Even today, scanning is fraught with problems that remain unclear to many. As mentioned, the biggest is the lack of information and I blame the professionals for not adequately informing the public.
The next is the lack of good scanners and it's a big problem—and Kodachrome slides have special requirements when scanned. Ideally, slides should be scanned at a color depth of more than the standard 8 bits per channel (24-bit) to stop color banding in sky areas. (Banding shows up as annoying discontinuities in colors that are close but range over a gentle gradient such as sky areas and it's caused by insufficient bits). Kodachrome has enough color dynamic range to make banding obvious. Banding is stopped by going to 48-bit color depth but unfortunately many scanners cannot support it (hence my comment about the lack of good scanners). It's also an excellent reason why you should keep your original slides and negatives.
Also, Kodachrome slides are particularly difficult to scan because they are intrinsically different to other color films in that they contain residual silver and this throws the scanning out. The better scanners allow for this and they also come with specialized software to overcome the problem.