I’ve accumulated an awful lot of photographs now from the Library of Congress, and while I’ve posted quite a lot over the past 18 months or so on here, I felt it time to do something a little different.
To that end, and because wordpress blogs are free, I’ve set up another blog to run in parallel to this that is dedicated to the planes, boats and trains that I’m interested in. In fact that’s what it’s called – planesboatstrains.wordpress.com.
This will simply be one photograph at a time, with bare minimum information – title, date taken, photographer and link to the image on the Library of Congress website. I will post them more frequently than the posts on here as less time is spent in their creation!

They have all seen some limited editing on Lightroom from me – primarily cropping, straightening and sharpening and maybe some global tonal adjustments such as contrast. This is because although the scans are of a very high quality, they are just raw scans from the negative and as such tend to be rather flat looking. The colour ones aren’t too bad but but as they are slide film, some of the ones taken in low light suffer from blocked up shadows so have required some more work to extract detail. The nature of slide film also means that some scans had some unusual colour casts and so I’ve had a crack at adjusting these to what I think is something like.
The oldest negatives are glass plates and are over a hundred years old, so some of these have required use of the healing brush in Photoshop to tidy up scratches, dust, cracks and damage. Unfortunately it’s not possible to load the full resolution images onto the blog so it’s not possible to see the jaw dropping resolution of the biggest files but nonetheless you can appreciate the quality of the images even at web size.

I will continue to post library of Congress images on here, accompanied by my own narrative but the individual images now have their own home here: http://planesboatstrains.wordpress.com.