Islanddawn,

thank you very much for these photographs. When you click on the "sources" underneath the series there is a lot of information more as about the magic lantern as for instance from the Victorian age...

Kind regards from your friend,

Paul.

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg around noon arriving for the dedication of the national cemetery and about three hours before he gave the Gettysburg Address.


19 November 1863

2 May 1945, the Soviet flag is raised over the Reichstag in Berlin, photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei;

Cadillac Square, Detroit, Michigan 1872 featuring the newly unveiled Soldiers & Sailors Monument commemorating Michigan warriors killed in the American Civil War. It's 'Motortown' before any Cadillacs or before any cars at all:




Here's a view of the Monument in its contemporary setting. Note the additional figures added on the upper plinths:

Sixty years ago today, Tenzing Norgay photographed on the summit of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary;

The BBC's imagine series has this summer broadcast 2 stunning programs looking at mid-20th Century photography.

The first is about Vivian Maier, an American nanny and amateur photographer who took over 150,000 amazing photographs in the 1950s and 1960s but which were totally unknown and unpublished in her lifetime:

Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures?

The second is the bleaker subject matter of war photography and the work of English photojournalist Donald McCullin during his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s:

McCullin

Jacqui and David Morris' film on Don McCullin is unrelentingly graphic so be warned. For that reason, and at an hour and a half long, it's probably best watched piecemeal in digestible snippets rather than all in one go.

Not sure if these films are available to view for those outside Great Britain & Northern Ireland but no doubt they will become available on other sites.

Vizzer,
 
" Not sure if these films are available to view for those outside Great Britain & Northern Ireland"
 
In fact no, but nevertheless thanks cher Vizzer (I don't use "dear" while in my ears it  sounds so "dear"  ...)

Kind regards and with esteem,

your Paul.

Vivian Maier on youtube;

Thanks a lot, Triceratops for showing one of Vizzer's videos. Just seen it. Interesting stuff.

Have not that much time. Did for the ex-BBC messageboards once Albert Kahn, can find it back perhaps...
In the meantime:

 https://www.google.be/search?q=albert+kahn+photographs&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=SHjcUZGhFYnDPObygJAM&ved=0CC4QsAQ&biw=1240&bih=731


http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/firstworldwar.html

If you have some time, you can find a lot about it (youtube etc) on the net...to publish it here on our site...

Kind regards and with esteem,

Paul.

PS. Glad to see you back.

Albert Kahn

Old, and some not so old, photographs from around the British Isles

http://www.francisfrith.com/search/

http://www.visitthepast.co.uk/

Colorized historical photographs;

Colorized Photos

Life Magazine's archive of photographs on google;

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Here's some restored and colourised photos of the discovery of Tut's tomb. Beautifully done, some have an almost painterly feel.







http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/11977795/King-Tuts-tomb-Colourised-photos-documenting-Howard-Carters-discovery.html?frame=3492848

Fascinating photos ferval, thanks for sharing. I spent ages pouring over them trying to take in every detail.

Don't make a monkey out of me:

Oh and on the subject of King Tut's tomb, a possible new discovery of an unkown chamber? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/11/151106-tut-tutankhamun-tomb-thermal-imaging-nefertiti-archaeology/

Although I'm highly suspicious of National Georgraphic now that it has been bought out by Murdoch.

It seems that Zahi Hawass's nose is seriously out of joint!

http://www.egyptindependent.com/opinion/nicholas-reeves-did-not-discover-tomb-no-63

Colourised photo of the British 1924 Everest Expedition;

I remember this image, though had quite forgotten it again until today when it was used in a newspaper article about the courageous black photographer Peter Magubane who operated in apartheid-ridden South Africa (and suffered for his profession when he served over a year in solitary confinement from 1974 for having the audacity to photograph whites when the police were around).



Click on image to read the article from today's Guardian

This photograph of a young girl and her family's maid from Johannesburg in 1956 went around the world, and indeed for many people it was the first indication of the ludicrously racist ethos that passed for "normality" in a country still seen at that time as one of the British Commonwealth's great successes by way of its ex-empire dominions. Southern state Americans alas could all too readily identify with it.

Hmm ... I'm not at all convinced by that 1924 Everest picture. It's very 'blue' and looks just like a 19th century aquatint ... ie a printed b&w photo, hand or machine coloured using a limited palette, to make the picture more life-like. Are we expected to believe that the leader of the expedition got his mother to knit matching scarves and gloves for all the team using the same pale blue wool?

And pale blue surely wasn't a popular colour in the 1920s. The watercolour paintings and drawing done by Dr Wilson, scientific officer to Capt Scott's first Antarctic expedition, show mostly practical browns and greys (furs, leather, twill, tweed, worsted, denim, oiled or waxed canvas etc), with just the occasional flash of colour from a shirt collar, or a knitted woollen sweater, scarf of mitten, and these flashes of colour are predominantly dark reds, dark blues, or dark greens, ... or creamy white of cotton or unbleached canvas.

So in that Everest photo I think someone's just made the colouring up ... and in the absence of any real colour evidence they've just plumped for a neutral but unconvincing pale blue. And with a very bright/light background of snow I'd have thought the original would have had to be slightly over-exposed to get a good contrast, and so if the photographer had been able to use colour film, any colours would have been artificially darkened compared to real life. The colourised photo is little improvement on the original b&w photo ... unless someone can explain how they "reconstructed"  the over-riding blue colours from just the original negative's shades of grey.

As an aside is 'colourised' a new word now? The process of applying touches of colour to black and white photos is called colour tinting last I heard, which is a while ago come to think of it.

I can understand the use of "colourised" in photography terms as "coloured photograph" indicates that the film was colour sensitive to begin with and "colour tinted" implies a rather specific technique that was used back in the day to apply faint tints rather than bold colours to black and white proofs in order to suggest rather than reproduce the reality of the subject in a multichromatic sense.

Here is an iconic Life Magazine photo from the 1930s in modern digitally colourised format. I am sure you'd agree that the term "tinting" wouldn't do the skill of the colourist justice here - the quality is equal to the best colour photography produced using the best film and equipment:



Hand-tinted photographs were an art form in themselves, the colour having to be applied to the negative in reverse chromatically, not an easy thing to do at all. Creating personalised postcards, for example, was a lucrative trade back in Victorian and Edwardian days, and since the customer was often ordering what would be a "one-off" special care was taken to make them as good as possible using very skilled technicians (who were as much chemists as they were artists). This is a good example of one of these personalised photographs adapted to be sent as a postcard:



Whereas this is the the more standard fare for hand-tinted negatives:

How does the modern digital colourisation technique work? In that Life Magazine image the negative was presumably just in shades of grey so how does the method work to recreate colour? How is the woman's dress determined to be blue and white check, rather than say red and white? I'm not being sarcastic ... I suppose I should look it up.

There's a company called Mary Sweeney Photography which specialises in digitally colourising (colorising - they're American) and who are recognised as one of the leading practitioners in getting the colours right, using some very diligent historical sleuthing if necessary. They refunded one customer several thousand dollars having produced a colour portrait for them of someone from the 30s only to find that the woman's purse (handbag) was actually a designer version and they'd got the colour wrong. The article in the paper about it and the refund were, I imagine, contrived to generate publicity for them as well, but in it they talked about their sleuthing techniques which examined contemporaneous sources ranging from available colour images to clothing catalogues and written descriptions, anything at all in fact that might be relevant. It sounded a really painstaking process.

Others probably just "go with their gut".

Thanks, I guessed it was basically reliant on research to determine the original colours (or the most likely original colours) rather than anything else.... which is why I can accept the 1930s blue and white gingham dress, but have trouble with the 1920s blue woollen scarves and mittens (unless the Everest team did actually keep accurate sartorial diaries).

This is the same photo as displayed on the National Geographic site:



Seems a compositor on their website felt the same as you did, MM!

And they also had access to some rather recent evidence of what colour clothes at least one of the lads had on them at the time - if rather gruesome:

nordmann wrote:

There's a company called Mary Sweeney Photography which specialises in digitally colourising (colorising - they're American)

Surely for the US it would colorized?

Seriously though, thanks for the explanation.

The Romanovs are the Imperial Family that ruled Russia for over three centuries. Here are some photographs of Nicholas II's family during part of the First World War: 1915-1916.   
http://mashable.com/2015/01/10/Romanov-family-photos/

The oldest photographs in the world




Kind regards, Paul.

On Monday night there was a programme about photography in Britain on BBC4.

One of the photographers featured was Christina Broom, who took up photography to support herself after her husband became too ill to work. She was effectively the photographer of the Household Division of the Army, as well as recording the Suffragettes.

Described as the first female photo journalist, this link shows some of Christina's work:

Christina Broom



the woman herself:

Winston gets a photo-op.

The invention of the halftone process and it's use commercially for the bulk printing of photographs in newspapers, gave politicians the chance for what today are described as photo opportunities.

Home Secretary Winston Churchill at the "Siege of Sydney Street" in 1911:

Colour photos from 1928:

1928 in Colour

Thanks for the photographs Triceratops.

Kind regards, Paul.

Collection of 1840s photographs made by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson of Edinburgh:

Hill & Adamson

Thanks for the photographs Triceratops. It are nearly historical documents.

Kind regards, Paul.

Ferval .... had you seen these?

The Guardian: Urchins and alleyways - 19th century Glasgow in pictures

Photos of Glasgow in the 1860s and 70s by Thomas Annan.

Yes, we're fortunate to have a extensive archive of early photographs and many are available on line. What I find striking is how little changed over 100 years.  

Here are pictures from the 1970s some of which look - and feel - much like many of those from a century earlier. Currently there's a campaign to prevent the redevelopment of this building, said the be the oldest pub on the same site in the city.

Oh, how I remember these days - Then and now, London in the Summer of Love, 1967

I was in London in the summer of '66 and '67 and yes, my skirts were at least as short as those of the girls in the Carnaby St. photo. Extreme minis didn't appear to have reached Portobello Rd though. In '66 I was taken to a strip joint in Soho - so bold and rebellious we were - but in '67 I went shopping in Liberties and bought a print blouse and a plaid pinafore, I wish I still had them.

Some great photos there ferval. I particularly like the ones showing Carnaby Street and Leicester Square before pedestrianisation. Carnaby St was already unofficially pedestrianised even in those days as evidenced by the young woman pushing the pram down the middle of the street. Some have suggested that Carnaby Street lost it's authentic groove when pedestrianisation became official in 1973 and that it's just lived off its 1960s reputation ever since. A bit like Abbey Road and its zebra crossing perhaps.

When, about 10 years later, plans were announced for the pedestrianisation of Leicester Square, I remember the Evening Standard running a half-hearted and rather lame campaign of opposition - "Keep provincial suburban planning out of W1" - citing Carnaby St as an example of pedestrianisation quashing an area's essential vitality. They couldn't have been more wrong though. Whereas Carnaby Street may have been frozen in aspic by pedestrianisation, Leicester Square changed out of all recognition becoming much more vibrant than it had been before and also breathing new life into much of the rest of the West End.

Photographs of Glasgow, taken by French photo-journalist Raymond Depardon in 1980:

Glasgow 1980

Site for the aerial photographs of Captain Alfred G Buckham:


Home Page


"If one's right leg is tied to the seat with a scarf or a piece of rope, it is possible to work in perfect security".

I was reading about the relatively unsung Indo-European Telegraph Line which linked Bombay to London overland via Persia, Russia and Germany. Opened in 1870 it competed directly with the Eastern Telegraph undersea cable. While Eastern Telegraph was a British company (later becoming part of Cable & Wireless), the Indo-European was built and maintained by the then little-known German company of Siemens and catapulted them to global recognition in electrical engineering. The Siemens website provides a (nearly warts 'n all) history of the company, marking 175 years of its operations including remarkable photos of projects from around the world dating back to the 19th century.

Siemens: 175 years in photos

The funeral cortege of Abraham Lincoln parading through the streets of New York. The building on the left, on the corner of Broadway and Union Square is the home of Cornelius van Schaak Roosevelt, and watching from the window, 6 years old future President, Theodore Roosevelt and his brother Elliot:

Photographs of people born in the 18th century who lived long enough to reach the age of photography.

A couple of them were reputedly born in the 1730s