Category: Ships
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#400 – Library of Congress Images – SS Rotterdam at Holland America Line Terminal, Hoboken
This is a panorama created from three separate 8×10 glass plate negative scans. Needless to say, the resultant file is rather large! I recently upgraded my computer as my 6 year old PC with 4GB of RAM struggled with files like this, but the new one has significantly more processing power and Photoshop CC…
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#398 – Library of Congess Images – Main Street Buffalo
I’m guessing that this photograph was taken by some intrepid photographer climbing a tall riverside gilding such as a grain elevator as for the most part, downtown Buffalo looks quite a low lying city with few tall buildings. What strikes me about this scene is the clear summer sky, as so many of the photographs…
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#392 – Library of Congress Images – River Steamers
Harbor Springs, Mich., Str. North Land at dock Large river steamers were not unique to America, big Paddle Steamers carried day trippers on British rivers too. Steamers such as the PS Waverley were once a common site on the Clyde, Bristol Channel, and around Britain’s coasts. And, like America, by the 1960’s, their days of…
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#382 – Library of Congress Images – Paddle Steamer Tashmoo
If you’re slightly familiar with some of my blog posts from this year, you’ll have seen a number featuring the Lake Lucerne paddle steamers in Switzerland. So it felt like a good idea to look at what the Library of Congress archive held when it came to paddle steamers. Answer – hundreds. This is just one of…
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#378 – Library of Congress Images – Ocean Liners
There’s something rather elegant in the design of the ships from the late Victorian / early Edwardian era. There’s something about the low set superstructures on top of the high hulls that made them look quite racy. This is the RMS Oceanic, the largest ship in the world at the time of it’s launch in 1899,…
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#375 – Library of Congress Images – Building Liberty Ships at Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard
Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. A shipyard with a crane. (sic) One of the biggest contributions America made to the war effort was its enormous industrial base and associated ingenuity. It was Henry Fords protege’s from the motor industry who were brought in to help the conversion of the peace time manufacturing industry to an incredible machine…
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#374 – Library of Congress Images – Industrial Landscape Panorama
This is a join up of two 8×10 glass negatives so as you can imagine the digital file is huge! Panoramas are (relatively) easy to produce digitally, especially when you have the right tripod head, a fast computer and the right software, but taking one using a large format camera and making darkroom prints must…
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#362 – Library of Congress Images – USS Maryland in dry dock
I mentioned in the first post in this series about the quality of the glass plate negatives in the Library of Congress archive. I love looking at these images at 100%, it’s not so much pixel peeping as seeing what is in the image as they are so big. They are scans from 8×10 negatives…
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#361 – Library of Congress Images – Launch of Battleship Georgia at Bath, Maine.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994015360/PP/ I recently discovered the Library of Congress online photo archive, an amazing archive of photographs depicting many aspects of American life up to the 1950’s. Online are thousands of scanned photographs, many of high quality glass negatives. The resolution on these will blow you away, and the high resolution scans are available to…
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#355 – More Lucerne Paddle Steamers!
A change from my usual hotel resulted in the opportunity to see Lucerne from a different perspective, so finding the highest point in the hotel I was legally allowed in, I took my camera, opened the window and snapped away unhindered! In front of Lucerne’s vast railway station. The arch was from the original (very…
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#347 – Lucerne Steamers (again)
A fairly exhausting schedule recently has seen me visit beautiful Switzerland 4 times in as many months. One of the bonuses is staying in Lucerne, a small city that somehow manages to be big at the same time. Lake Lucerne is home to a small fleet of Paddle Steamers and these are slowly being brought…
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#341 – Reworked Images 7 – High and Dry
When I visited the Duke of Lancaster a few years back, I took the opportunity to take a lot of photographs, from as many different angles as I could think, on a variety of different lenses. At the time, I only actually processed about 10 or 12 of them, but after a 3 years break I…
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#326 – Lucerne Steamboats 2
The 1906 built paddle steamer Schiller is one of five in the SGV fleet. It was given an extensive rebuild between 1998-2000 during which extensive work was done on the hull and superstructure. Like all the steamers, she appeared to be laid up for the winter with her vents closed off and the external deck…
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#325 – Lucerne Steamboats 1
Business travel is a mixed blessing, as although it beats spending your life working in the same factory or office, the reality is spending time in someone else’s factory or office, and not much time seeing the place where you are visiting. But there again, that’s what you are being paid to do, so any…
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#316 – Little Mountains
Surrounding Lake Lucerne are a range of mountainous valleys, which open up onto the Lake. The lake itself is large, and criss-crossed by steamboats and more modern ferries. It is also home to fleets of gravel boats, as the lakebed is being dredged for the material that is then shipped to the shore. I was enjoying…
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#313 – The Duke of Lancaster’s New Clothes
Seeing the Duke of Lancaster from the road for the first time is a bit of a surreal experience. The North Wales coast road is a fairly uninteresting drive as coast roads go, you can rarely if ever see the sea, and the road is a frustrating affair of dual carriageways, single carriage ways, roundabouts,…
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#306 – Chatham Dockyard 1 – Ships
DING, CLASH, DONG, BANG, BOOM, BOOM, RATTLE, CLASH, BANG, CLINK, BANG, CLATTER, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This is, or soon will be, the ACHILLES, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve hundred men are working on her now; twelve hundred men working on stages over her sides, over her bows, over her stern, under…
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#257 – Riverdance
I posted this photograph of the MS Riverdance a couple of years back, but seeing the recent posts on Geotopoi of the wreck of the MV Carrier brought back a few memories. The story is well documented – storm force winds hit Britain at the end of January 2008, and overnight, the cargo ferry Riverdance was hit by…
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#224 – Calshot
Here’s one I wasn’t aware of, probably because it’s not in an advanced state of decay! This is the SS Calshot, a tug tender built at, and used on, Southampton docks during the era of the great ocean liners – Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Normandie, United States, etc. Although it was open to the public,…
Mechanical Landscapes 