Mike Serpa
Major
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2013
White House Landing, Virginia. Michigan & Pennsylvania Relief Association camp
LOC #01806
LOC #01806
When you enlarge the photos some of the people on the right almost look odd, like they were superimposed into the photo or is it just a peculiarity that occurs sometimes with old photos taken in outdoor settings? Nonetheless, the photo is really neat, thanks for sharing it!
I would guess they were not added to the photo. There are other photos that appear to have the sky altered. Maybe @civilwarincolor knows more about this? Look where the trees meet the sky in these photos.
Wow! Thanks @civilwarincolor I had no idea they did that kind of primitive photoshopping. It explains why those men off to the right look a little odd. I've seen photos with the wonky looking trees before like the ones Mike has in his second post and just assumed it was windy and it made the trees look funny. Would never have guessed they painted a blank sky in.
Very poor condition. Thanks for help cwic!Yes, they seemed to have no problem damaging the negative. Sometimes you can tell why they would have done it as with the two that @Mike Serpa shared at the start of this post the image is fairly dark and the resulting sky would have just looked really dark. In others the image itself looks great, so not sure why the did this.
If you look at this picture of Lincoln meeting with officers at Antietam you can tell that the same thing was done, but the main part of the image looks good. No idea why they would have masked out the sky on this one.
To be honest when I work on restoration of images I replace the skies in my images today, but since I am using Photoshop I have a lot more control over it and can make it so that you can not really notice.
If you look at images like this you can see how it possibly would have looked for an image that was not corrected. Due to the damage in images like these below I still have no way to "fix" it in Photoshop to bring the image back usable form.
He doesn't seem happy with it.In the first photo. The woman and man sitting on ground. Why would the man have a great big bow on him? Any thoughts.
It looks like garbage on the ground at the right. Difficult for me to determine what is going on. Washing dishes in the center? Sewing on the left?On the original photo LOC# 01806, I have to question the excessive amount of litter and haphazard placement of materials. This is very uncommon for any photos I have seen taken in the field. Most settings are extremely clean and orderly which is a requirement from headquarters. Now I understand this is only a Relief Association, but whatever guidelines they were to follow seems to have been cast aside as well.
Lubliner.
Chow Line I believe, which makes me think that a bit of merriment has been taking place as well.He doesn't seem happy with it.
It looks like garbage on the ground at the right. Difficult for me to determine what is going on. Washing dishes in the center? Sewing on the left?
The man standing behind the basket is a pouring a bottle!Chow Line I believe, which makes me think that a bit of merriment has been taking place as well.
Lubliner.
I cannot believe the litter in the foreground could be food scraps. That would be totally impermissible, due to pesky insects. I half wondered if a quilt cover was laid out on the tent, and cotton was in the bowl in front of the sitting woman. My first thought was picnic blanket, but the idea of detritus baffles me.The man standing behind the basket is a pouring a bottle!
I wonder if the women are sewing and ribbon guy got roped into helping.I cannot believe the litter in the foreground could be food scraps. That would be totally impermissible, due to pesky insects. I half wondered if a quilt cover was laid out on the tent, and cotton was in the bowl in front of the sitting woman. My first thought was picnic blanket, but the idea of detritus baffles me.
Lubliner.
Unfortunately this is more common than you would think. When negatives became damaged to the point that prints could not be made the photographers used techniques to allow them to keep using an image. Without the advent of Photoshop it was not uncommon for these changes to be made directly to an original negative! This meant that they could get a print from the photo that could be sold, but any changes made were permanent.
One thing that is important to remember is that we often look at these images as enlargements and the damage is very noticeable. During the 19th century the most common type of print (which most of these were) was a stereo card that had two nearly identical images each about 2x3". Another common item was the Carte de viste. These were the "trading cards" of the day and were about the size of a modern business card. When you have images this small and you had a sky or background that had darkened due to exposure, bad chemicals, etc. the only way to fix this would be to use black paint on the negative to mark out the damaged area. When the negative was exposed the black paint would end up as a blank white space and since this is typically how sky was on undamaged prints, it was "OK". When you look at this on the size and scale of the finished prints it was not that much different than the sky would have been on a "good" print.
So, nobody was superimposed, just an example of trying to do damage repair.
Here are two of my choices for worst damage cover up in a CW photograph.
The first one of Meade and Porter is actually an interior shot, but since the walls behind the subjects were usually blank, they treated it the same as they would sky.
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The next is Grant. When you look at this image of him at Cold Harbor it looks fine at this resolution, but when you download the full size image and zoom in you see the problem.
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This is the same image, just zoomed in on the face to show changes made. In this case they would have used white paint on the negative to make black marks that would show up on the finished print.
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