Photographs

Recently The Better Half and I were watching a TV programme set in post war 1940s Britain, the authenticity was good up to a point. The clothes were right, the hairstyles and makeup was right and I can be sure of these because firstly, I was around then and secondly I have lots of pictures of my family from that time and they match. The one detail they got wrong was the photographs they took. The characters in the story took some snaps and had them developed and they came out BROWN!

Photos were not brown in the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties or fifties. Probably not before then either, they were black and white. This seems to have become a modern myth that old photos were all sepia brown, maybe some very early ones were before the process of developing pictures became an industry standard, but since there is no one alive today who saw them as new, we may never know.

Old photos often turn brown over a period of time, maybe fifty years or more but they were black and white when they were new.

I have several ancient photos of my ancestors, many of which have turned brown, even have some pictures I took and developed myself as a teenager, which have also turned brown with age. These were black and white when I developed them, I can assure you.

With the magic of computers I can turn them into black and white or turn black and white into sepia, but they should be black and white, at least as far back as the 1920s.

My father and his older brother were both keen photographers and snapped pictures endlessly from the 1920s on and I have a lot of them. My uncle in particular was fanatical about photographs and belonged to different amateur photographer’s clubs. Because of this he took thousands of photos in black and white and in colour when 35mm colour film became easily obtainable. He worked for Kodak and so got his processing done wholesale and as a result of this he took more pictures than one would expect most people to manage in a lifetime. I have recently inherited the task of scanning and sorting his myriad pictures and because so many of them are excellent pictures in their own right, I decided that I would share a few here on BlogSpot.

This is one of my ancestors from the 18  somethings and is expected to be brown, although it may have been black and white originally

This is one of my uncle's photos.  A favourite subject throughout Britain, the Red Arrows.

I have to confess that I do not know where many of these pictures were taken and this is no exception.  No doubt someone will be able to tell me which cathedral this is.  

British Calvary 

A field somewhere in the UK c 1980

A converted mill

A peacock 

A clipper ship

Re thatching a roof.  Not a cheap job, this will cost around 30,000 GBP these days, depending on the size of the roof.

A field somewhere in the UK, a good subject for water colours

A Windmill also somewhere in the UK

A canal bridge

This is just a very small sample of the massive collection I have, some of his colour slides date from the 1950s, through to the 1980s when he died.  Many have historic content because they show cars that have long gone to the breaker's yard and places that no longer look the way they did when the pictures were taken.  He did  a lot of portraits and a whole set of pictures of his workplace, which shows the massive kind of equipment that Kodak used to process the streams of film that was used before the advent of the digital camera.