Vintage Photos - Lot 3 (505-508)
After getting a new scanner several years ago to scan some old slides my grandparents had, I picked up several batches of slides from Goodwill and eBay. I'm not sure why these commonly wind up at places like that but many seem to ultimately have come from estate sales. Maybe family members just don't know what to do with them or don't care. I've seen them advertised as being for crafts so maybe they are commonly used for that purpose. I was more interested in the actual contents. Each slide is a little slice of history from a particular time and place. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. There are thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here mainly because I find them an interesting way to look back at the past.
Unfortunately, the photos from this batch don't seem to generally have dates stamped on them like most of the previous batches I've gone through. However, they generally seem to be from the 1950s and 1960s. Like some of the previous batches, this one came from eBay and I don't know much about the origins of these photos other than that.
Batch = A bunch of slides I bought in a single purchase. Usually they are from the same ultimate origin but not necessarily. Typically, a batch will have 100s or even 1000s of slides.
Set = Subset of a batch. A group of slides I scan together. There are normally four slides in one set because that's how many slides my scanner can scan at once. Likewise, a post will typically have one set of fours slides. Organizationally, it's just the easiest way for me to handle things.
These were all scanned with an Epson Perfection V600 Photo scanner.
All of these photos were likely taken circa 1959.
At least the first three photos feature what look like museum displays. The first features a dive suit (along with a boy sitting next to it), the second features a display that shows a submarine launching a missile, and the third appears to show another display illustrating a World War II battle. Based on the timing and subject matter, these may have been taken at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Museum / Washington Navy Yard Museum which became the National Museum of the United States Navy in 1962.
The last photo features what looks like another display but it looks like a scene from an earlier more primitive Hawaii or other Pacific Island location and seems sort of out of place for a U.S. Navy museum. The most interesting part of this photo to me is that you can make out a partial reflection of the photographer in the glass.
See the previous post in this series here.
The entire batch that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here. This also includes higher resolution versions and versions with postprocessing.
Check out some of my other recent posts:
Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #14 – DM0127.DOC
https://ecency.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/digital-archaeology-floppy-disk-14-7ed5e1250e4d2
Vintage Photos - Lot 3 (501-504)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-lot-3-501
Atlas V Launch of the Solar Orbiter (2020-02-10)
https://ecency.com/hive-181335/@darth-azrael/hryolofk
Vintage Photos - Lot 3 (401-404)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-lot-3-401-1e950d7e78ea2
Zaxxon (Commodore 64)
https://ecency.com/hive-140217/@darth-azrael/zaxxon-commodore-64
Vintage Photos - Lot 3 (397-400)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-lot-3-397
Check out my other Social Media haunts (though most content is links to stuff I posted on Hive or re-posts of stuff originally posted on Hive):
Wordpress: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/darth-azrael
X: https://x.com/Darth_Azrael
Blogger: https://megalextoria.blogspot.com/
Odyssee: https://odysee.com/@Megalextoria:b
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2385054
Daily Motion: https://www.dailymotion.com/Megalextoria
Books I am reading or have recently read:
A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G. Parry
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson
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The first image with the dive suit is giving a scene from a horror film.
The 2nd image is my favorite, It has history written all over it.
What a gem of a photo, it has a very special charm 📸✨ Do you have any favorite stories or memories related to any of these images?
Cool!
I've worked quite a bit on correcting scans, got my first negative scanner in 96. Haven't billed that too often, but the underlying knowledge is helpful.
Sometimes it can be real hard, but sometimes its easy. Tested that last one, super easy, basically all of the colours are intact "under" the blue haze:
I usually the raw scans but I scan the images twice, the second time with the built it color correction and digital ICE features of the scanner. Usually it does a pretty good job. Not as good as skilled manual correction perhaps but not bad. This one was color corrected with no manual intervention by me:
Cool. Yeah with a project like this it makes total sense to post them as is :-)
This was fun! These are great even with something as simple as auto levels :-)
Normally it takes quite a bit of work in curves, or even more complex things to get anything that looks natural.
Makes me wonder what film this is? And its pretty sure that its had optimal storage conditions
While I remember, one thing that worked well was to correct & enhance heavily on a copy of the initial layer, then simply reduce the transparency until some middle ground was reached.
Works even better if leaving them for a while to then come back, while doing the actual work its so easy to go too far, like I probably did here haha
I'm not sure what magic Epson's software uses for color correction but I know that for scratch/dust removal it combines an RGB scan with an infrared scan (hence taking longer). This can result in artifacts for slides that used Kodachrome film...something to do with the fact it uses silver.
Of course its Kodachrome haha, I guess the blue hue made me think otherwise... It was the most stable of all, I used it a bit in the late eighties, but not after that.
Yes the structure of Kodachrome is different, actually it forms a sort of 3D relief, you can see that when you tilt the backside where the emulsion is, reflected light will show those patterns.
I have a 4x5/120/135 Epson scanner that is stranded back in Europe, rare thing that I got cheap, hope it has survived!
You're right in that Kodachrome was the most stable and typically have the least amount of color fading. I'm not actually sure what this set was. Possibly Ektachrome.
I see, well its coded outside of the image area, would guess (almost?) all Ectachrome produced has that printed?
Kodachrome is a very complicated, totally different process where each layer for the colours ends up being composed of a dyed compound only, so no silver, no fading.
Remember following efforts that people did to be able to keep it going, but ultimately it was actually impossible, at least in practical terms.
@darth-azrael, you're rewarding 2 replies from this discussion thread.