Antique classics

[Wenge]

http://podakuni.livejournal.com/681121.html

old great stuff.. just re-posting for anyone haven't seen this treasure of images from yesterday.

 

[kgb144]

Fascinating images. Thank you for sharing.

 

[citizen99]

Thanks - a great set of images.

 

[FrozenInTime]

Superb images - love the tonality and luminosity in those old plates.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

LJ is old, good and classic as well 🙂

 

[Paulbe]

Wonderful! Thanks for posting...!

 

[HuubL]

Wow, amazing! Excellent compositions for most of these.

 

[David Hughes]

Wonderful; technically and aesthetically. Thanks for the link.

Regards, David

 

[traveler_101]

Interesting photographs. particular for documenting the turn-of-the-20th-century urban infrastructure and life. Remarkable clarity: what kinds of cameras were used for these ?

 

[E.M]

thank you very much , I really enjoy looking at pictures like this 8

 

[robbeiflex]

Number 021 | 1900 | Buffalo, New York. "Labor Day parade, Main Street" is impressive. I was there about 100 years later on a cold winter night, and that area was feeling its age. There were much fewer people... OK, only me.

 

[David Hughes]

Interesting photographs. particular for documenting the turn-of-the-20th-century urban infrastructure and life. Remarkable clarity: what kinds of cameras were used for these ?

Hi,

Roughly speaking; very large format that would make 10 x 8 film look medium. The best lens then were pretty good by any standard and weren't so limited by diffraction. So you got f/22 f//32, f/45 and f/64 as normal but not f/2.8

Also the big jumps in lens design had come about then and the new optical glasses available were inspiring people.

Lastly, each plate would be developed individually in a darkroom with a safelight on, as it was Ortho and not Pan film. So the latent image could be watched and got exactly right by experienced photographers. And then contact prints could be made from the plates and that avoids enlarging and gives a lot of detail.

And they used tripods...

Regards, David

PS (Edit) On the computer screen the image is greatly reduced, this usually makes images & text look more precise and sharp. Even a 10% reduction improves things: best experimented with using a photocopier.

 

[oftheherd]

Great fun to look at them all. Especially interesting to me were the photos of the Washington, DC of an earlier era.