Many found photographs

PeterSpencer said:
From a collection of negatives inherited from my dad's cousin Frank Holmes.

IOM TT, year?

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The negatives are 6x6 and the orientation of the frames suggests a camera other than a TLR. Must have been a decent camera because the negative quality is almost uniformly good, despite obvious operational defects like camera shake and the occasional bad exposure.
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That’s up on the mountain road somewhere close to ´The Bungalow ´ by the looks of it.

Those old Nortons , BSA and other old bikes still do a 1 lap ´race ´ each year during TT week which will start very soon this year ( last week may practices/ first week June races.)

It’s a long time since I was last on the island to watch but as I had all my childhood there and dad was a motorcyclist ( not pro!) , I found myself regularly high on the fumes for a fortnight sat in some very good viewing locations ( shame I wasn’t into togging at the time!)

My uncle used to offer his garage to racing crews during the fortnight so I got chance to see and sit on some pretty cool motorbikes, sidecars being my favourite.
 
Further to the pictures of the elephant ride, no mention of the bear. 1951 or so.

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Some wonderful images, lovely to look at on a grey damp afternoon! Thanks for posting them and please keep them coming.
 
Three from a collection of 35mm and 126 colour negatives (of which I actually only saved 25). The collection was about 100 film strips, 4 or 6 exposure. The pictures were pretty dire, consisting mostly of badly composed flower arrangements. I actually disposed of most of the negatives as it seemed pointless storing them.

Lazy cat...

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Produce...

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Finally a pair of images with an outrageous colour cast. Epson Scan wasn't able to repair these nor Photoshop's Auto Color feature and I didn't feel it was worth attempting a manual repair. Mind you, Lomographers eat your hearts out!

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I have to say that I'm in a bad place now as far as what I should do with the originals, 200 or so. Most of them don't be deserved of scanning, however a few, of which the above are most interesting to me, perhaps I should conserve?
 
Oh, definitely. Most of them won't resonate with you, but they have some social value, I suppose. It would seem a pity to junk them, because they must have meant something to those that took them. I'd just stick what you've got on a memory stick.
 
Some more wonderful images! Kodachrome is a big loss!

I would vote for conserve as well, but them I'm a hoarder. I think the issue is how they can be made available to the select few who would find them particularly interesting, although I think even ordinary, everyday images can have an interest for the generations afterwards as a glimpse of how life used to be.
 
Another vote for conservation here.

I've enjoyed seeing the pictures and following the posts in this thread and I'm sure in the future others will too.
 
The Kodachromes above were processed at a Kodalux laboratory so I had a look on the internet to see where the Kodalux labs were as I thought it might help identify locations. I wasn't that successful but found this pdf document.


There is some interesting and rather alarming information about the longevity of photographic slides.

Here is a suprising paragraph about slide projection times.

Keep the projection time of original slides or nonreplaceable duplicates to a minimum. For general applications, the total accumulated projection time for Fujichrome should not exceed about 5 hours (4 hours for Fujichrome Velvia); with Ektachrome do not exceed 21⁄2 hours; with Agfachrome do not exceed 2 hours; with Kodachrome do not exceed 1 hour (see Chapter 6).

Koachrome, despite its perceived stability, is vulnerable to fading if projection time is even quite modest.

The website has a massive collection of technical documents: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/.
 
PeterSpencer said:
There is some interesting and rather alarming information about the longevity of photographic slides.

Here is a suprising paragraph about slide projection times.

Keep the projection time of original slides or nonreplaceable duplicates to a minimum. For general applications, the total accumulated projection time for Fujichrome should not exceed about 5 hours (4 hours for Fujichrome Velvia); with Ektachrome do not exceed 21⁄2 hours; with Agfachrome do not exceed 2 hours; with Kodachrome do not exceed 1 hour (see Chapter 6).
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Interesting, it had never occurred to me that slides had a lifetime limit, or at least one that was so short.
 
Flighter said:
Interesting, it had never occurred to me that slides had a lifetime limit, or at least one that was so short.
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Presumably the time given is in front of the projector light; in most slide shows, that would be less than a minute for each showing (time enough for the story about this slide showing @Andysnap being rescued from an island somewhere)...

Some of my Kodachromes (of our New Zealand trip in 1974) were shown as slide shows several times. The colours show no signs of change, although the multiple handling has caused horrendous dust and fluff problems (unfortunately not auto-fixable with an IR scanner), and completely randomised sequence!
 
ChrisR said:
Presumably the time given is in front of the projector light; in most slide shows, that would be less than a minute for each showing (time enough for the story about this slide showing @Andysnap being rescued from an island somewhere)...

Some of my Kodachromes (of our New Zealand trip in 1974) were shown as slide shows several times. The colours show no signs of change, although the multiple handling has caused horrendous dust and fluff problems (unfortunately not auto-fixable with an IR scanner), and completely randomised sequence!
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I'm in the process of scanning another batch of Kodachromes and, as you say, the debris on the slides is unbelievable. I think it's partly the fault of them being mounted in carboard mounts as well as handling. The inside edges of the mounts are all hairy so I've been cropping tightly to avoid this and also the annoying, from the scanning point of view, rounded apertures of the older slides. The cropping, I'm confident in saying, quite often improves the mediocre pictures, although I am aware that is just my assessment of their merits. Included in the batch are some Agfachromes which are in sturdy plastic mounts with sharp rectangular apertures and these scan well.

I had a period of a few years when I mainly shot slides and I mounted what I considered to be the best in anti-Newton ring Gepe glass mounts. When I came to scan them, a few years ago, Epson scan would have nowt to do with the glass mounted slides so I moved them all to plain Gepe mounts and sold the hundreds of glass mounts.

If there was anything astonishing and unique in the collections I'm scanning I would have taken them out of the cardboard mounts and put them in Gepe plastic mounts, so far nothing extraordinary has come up so I have left as is.

By the way, I will preserve the original negatives and slides as best I can, I suppose I should.
 
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PeterSpencer said:
I have to say that I'm in a bad place now as far as what I should do with the originals, 200 or so. Most of them don't be deserved of scanning, however a few, of which the above are most interesting to me, perhaps I should conserve?
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I've got several hundred slides (Kodachromes, and a mixture of various others) and most of them are not worth my scanning. There ar a lot of photos of flowers, birds, and animals taken on safari-type trips. While I've no doubt that these were of great value and interest to the original photographer, and many of them are well composed and technically excellent, the subject matter isn't something I'm personally interested in. I much prefer the shots that have some historical interest, be it the way people look, places that have changed or pictures featuring older cars, boats, planes etc.

Pictures of flora & fauna don't have that same anchor in time for the most part - they might have been taken this morning apart from the medium used.

I wouldn't dispose of any of them - at least not by throwing them away - but I won't scan all of them, just the ones I think are of interest. I'll probably just pass them on to someone else at some point in the future.

I tend to find it a little sad when I look at old slides, knowing that in all likelihood the original photographer is no longer around and that, when they died they either had no next-of-kin to take ownership of their photographs or, if they did, then they didn't have enough attachment to the pictures to want to keep them in the family.
 
I buy slides from a well known online auction site. The price seems to have gone up a lot since this past year. Missed out on a really nice set a few days ago. I have a project ongoing called project unknown which is the same as Lee Shulman's The Anonymous Project but I only found out about his after I'd started mine. Most sets are on my website but I have a few processed and ready to go up as well as a few waiting to be scanned in :)
 
cardiff_gareth said:
I buy slides from a well known online auction site. The price seems to have gone up a lot since this past year. Missed out on a really nice set a few days ago. I have a project ongoing called project unknown which is the same as Lee Shulman's The Anonymous Project but I only found out about his after I'd started mine. Most sets are on my website but I have a few processed and ready to go up as well as a few waiting to be scanned in :)
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I bid for three boxes of slides the other day but dropped out at £50, maybe I should have pressed on, they were pictures of weddings and agricultural shows amongst other things.
 
PeterSpencer said:
Finally, "I'm sure I saw a Wallaby around here"...

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I keep coming back to this one. The more I look the more I think I know that chap.

I won't mention the name 'cause I'm probably wrong but, if I'm right, he was a director of Marconi Command and Control Systems when I worked there in the '80s. He was younger in this picture.
 
Finally finished scanning they latest batch of slides.

Not a great bunch of stuff and I have a suspicion I have been slightly, or even more than slightly, scammed because there was certainly, at least, the number of expected slides but I suspect they were, very definitely, cherry picked. The original photographer, if they indeed came from the same source, must have kept all the completely over and under exposed slides as well as the film offcuts. That's what I mainly got.

Following is a selection, my choice of what constitutes the best of the worst.
 
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