Rugd1022 Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 Have a shuftie at this fine little collection of images... http://mashable.com/2015/03/29/england-color-photos/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
richard i Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 These are great, will help to get the colors right. Thanks Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clearwater Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 Superb pics - thanks for highlighting. Excellent shot of Mauritania I wonder if the little girl on the beach is still with us...she'd be about 90 though! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium PaternosterRow Posted July 1, 2015 RMweb Premium Share Posted July 1, 2015 Brilliant! Thanks for sharing the link. Good old National Geographic - brought the world to many people in stunning colour long before the TV and the internet. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Smith Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Fantastic - I wonder if these have been colour enhanced? The colours certainly look very natural. I'm no photography expert but I am struck by the model-like look of the first and fourth, and maybe some others, I realized that it is because the background is out of focus, much like you'd get when photographing models. This is usually because of limited depth of field. However with a full sized subject at something like 10 metres you would expect the focus to be infinity, thus the background would also be in focus. I'd welcome any explanation for this...... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonny777 Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 They are marvellous. I think the saturation may be a little high, purely because of the long exposure times, but they show how colourful the inter-war years were. We get a rather duller impression from the multitudes of b/w prints. Note that on the photo of the woman posting a letter there are 7 collections listed for weekdays - Royal Mail please take notice. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Smith Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Apparently in those days you could post a letter across London and get a reply the same day....... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RhBBob Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Apparently in those days you could post a letter across London and get a reply the same day....... Yes, the red pillar box appears to show seven collection times for the day ! I can only recall having two morning collections (Mum called the later one the second post) and two afternoon, the last being at 6 pm. So in our town, you could certainly post a letter early and get a reply the same day ! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
coachmann Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Today's postal system has it all ass-upperts emptying boxes at 9am and delivering mail in't middle of afternoon! Lovely pictures though and it shows that humans dont change, just technology. Some woman's clothing would look fashionable today! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymw Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 The colours will not be accurate, but can give a guide, I suppose. (fwiw, there will be no accurate colour records possible). If you do a web search for the photographer you can find there are many similar images on the Nat. Geo. web pages, for example. The colour process was very slow, There would have been a lot of dark room fiddling to get something that would be printed in colour for the glossy magazine. I expect the camera would have been an 8 by 10, or similar large plate camera, hence the shallow focus distance. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rumblestripe Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 These are great, will help to get the colors right. Thanks Not so sure, those early colour films were pretty inaccurate. Just looking at the pillar box and telephone box, they look distinctly orange in the photographs. If there were weathered they would tend to pink not orange. I suspect that there has been some "colour balancing" performed on the images using Photoshop (or similar) the flesh tones look pretty good (but probably wouldn't have straight out of the processing) Interesting photographs though Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Southernboy Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Love it - thank you Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidB Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Love it - thank you I'm sure that at least one of those bus photos was taken in the London Borough of Frankland..... David Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pete_mcfarlane Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Autochromes always have a very distinct look to them - slightly fuzzy and the colours not quite right, that makes them rather endearing. The old soldier, who must have been born in the 1860s, is the spitting image of Sir Ian McKellan. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dj_crisp Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Awesome. Thanks for sharing. cheers Will Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Ron Ron Posted July 2, 2015 Share Posted July 2, 2015 Excellent shot of Mauritania The caption says "....at dock", when more accurately the ship is raised out of the water in the floating dry dock that used to live alongside Southampton's Eastern Docks, until WW2. I believe in its day, it was the largest such structure in the world. Great find, thanks to the OP for posting the link. . Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium PhilJ W Posted July 3, 2015 RMweb Premium Share Posted July 3, 2015 There's also some coloured moving pictures of similar vintage. The problem with colour films of such an age is that certain colours tend to fade more than others and the colour balance changes with time. They have attempted to correct this and made a pretty good job of it in my estimation. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium t-b-g Posted July 3, 2015 RMweb Premium Share Posted July 3, 2015 If may be impossible to say that the colours are correct in such photos. It is also impossible to say that every colour in every photo is wrong! Dodgy lighting or exposure may have meant that the wrong colour was captured in the first place and then the photographic processing and fading etc. may have corrected it. If you paint a model to match what is in the photos, there is a very good chance that you will be pretty close and that as the paint on the real object will fade and change over time, your model could very well be spot on for how it looked at some point. Superb photos and a great record of how things were. A number of those scenes are just crying out to be modelled. Tony Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium kevinlms Posted July 3, 2015 RMweb Premium Share Posted July 3, 2015 There's also some coloured moving pictures of similar vintage. The problem with colour films of such an age is that certain colours tend to fade more than others and the colour balance changes with time. They have attempted to correct this and made a pretty good job of it in my estimation. The problem is, that there is nothing better. Oh it would be nice to go back in time, with the best of current equipment and the current capability to take almost UNLMITED photos, as the cost is pretty close to ZERO. I wonder how much in the costs of the then time & presumably rare materials/techniques, it was to take these photos? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold Maltazer Posted July 3, 2015 RMweb Gold Share Posted July 3, 2015 The problem is, that there is nothing better. Oh it would be nice to go back in time, with the best of current equipment and the current capability to take almost UNLMITED photos, as the cost is pretty close to ZERO. I wonder how much in the costs of the then time & presumably rare materials/techniques, it was to take these photos? There are features in the photos that exist today, so presumably it would be possible for a modern computer to compensate and produce a more accurate rendering (given sufficient effort in setting it all up of course!) Mal Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold DaveF Posted July 4, 2015 RMweb Gold Share Posted July 4, 2015 The problem is, that there is nothing better. Oh it would be nice to go back in time, with the best of current equipment and the current capability to take almost UNLMITED photos, as the cost is pretty close to ZERO. I wonder how much in the costs of the then time & presumably rare materials/techniques, it was to take these photos? I don't know the exact figure but the autochrome process cost about 12 times as much as black and white photos. Data from a talk I gave on colour photography a few year ago - my research was partly from photo magazines and partly the web.. As an aside I've just worked out the cost of taking colour slides in 1969 was 1s, the equivalent of 5p in todays money. Adjusted for inflation each slide would cost about 73p today. So that's why colour photos are not too common from the 60s! Going back to autochrome days I think the equivalent cost today would be in ££per photo. David Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
andyman7 Posted July 4, 2015 Share Posted July 4, 2015 Yes, the red pillar box appears to show seven collection times for the day ! I can only recall having two morning collections (Mum called the later one the second post) and two afternoon, the last being at 6 pm. So in our town, you could certainly post a letter early and get a reply the same day ! But they didn't have mobiles, internet, instant messenger etc. so people and business were entirely reliant on the post - it's very impressive when you see the logistics of the old mail service but hardly justifies grumbling about todays service which inhabits a different world Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sir douglas Posted July 4, 2015 Share Posted July 4, 2015 very nice indeed, im sure that these have been shared on here ages ago Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1 Posted July 4, 2015 Share Posted July 4, 2015 Very nice indeed. Pity they can't spell colour properly though... steve :-) Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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