Boy this was hard work! The negatives were as rough as the environment they portray and must have been developed in gravy and moonshine. Most of the Library of Congress scans that you may have seen in earlier posts have required a few minutes work in Lightroom to give them some contrast and a bit…
Category: Black and White
#371 – Library of Congress Images – Allied Railways (and British Engines) in Iran
An American locomotive with an American soldier crew hauling freight to Russia somewhere in Iran. I was quite surprised to see world war 2 photographs of the Persian Corridor in the Library of Congress. This was the supply chain set up through Iran by the allies to supply Russia by road and rail. The motive…
#368 – Library of Congress Images – a trip on the Santa Fe in Black & White
People talk about how in the digital age, there is a lot of ‘machine gunning’ of scenes with dozens of photographs taken, and not all with a great deal of care and attention. In looking through the photographs of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway it seems that the practice wasn’t unheard of in…
#367 – Library of Congress Images – Santa Fe in Black & White
Going up? Or down? Wheel shop. Not sure what the significance of the white painted ones are – dummy ones for works use only? Or maybe ones that are waiting for machining / new tyres? This almost has a production line-like feel to it. The workshop is clearly quite large and by british standards quite modern. Interesting to…
#365 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Yard
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045480/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001024/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001028/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045487/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045474/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001046046/PP/resource/ Having explored inside the railway works, Jack Delano continued his documentation of the Chicago and North Western outside in the switching (shunting) yards. One tends to forget the enormous size of American steam locos until you see them with people next to them, and those depicted in these…
#364 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Workshops in Black & White
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001010167/PP/ Following on from the last post of the colour photographs of the Chicago and North Westerns workshops, this series are in a more familiar black and white. I say familiar due to the abundance of shed photographs taken in the 50’s and 60’s by British enthusiasts. However, these are different inasmuch as they…
#357 – Fletchers Paper Mill
This one is another of those which I’ve had trouble processing in the past. For some reason, the combination of colours, as well as the light, is slightly odd and has always left me struggling a bit – I’m still not sure if I’ve cracked it yet. I don’t know whether increasing the contrast in the…
#358 – Old Lane Mill
Sometimes images naturally lend themselves to high contrast, others don’t. In this I’ve shown what happens when you go too far. The starting monochrome conversion was inevitably quite flat, muddy looking even although given it was a grey overcast day on a muddy wasteland that’s to be expected. But overall, the scene just didn’t suit…
#353 – The Factory Photographs by David Lynch
It’s a while since I’ve seen anything by David Lynch, but I remember that he had a very odd way of seeing the world. Best known for films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and the weird Twin Peaks, he’s also had a number of solo art and photography exhibitions. His most recent exhibition and accompanying…
#352 – Cwm Bychan – Another Get Carter Landscape – 3
And so to finish off this short series, a few black and white images. After lugging my tripod several miles to allow me to do some exposure bracketing, I realised in post processing that it probably wasn’t necessary, there was adequate information in the correctly exposed raw file. But as I’d gone to the effort…
Mechanical Landscapes 