OK, time for a few holiday snaps, but mine consist of paddle steamers, factories and steam locomotives;) The River Dart runs through 18.5 miles of Devon countryside and is navigable from Dartmouth to Totnes. Dartmouth is best known for its Regatta and the Naval College, but is also a deepwater harbour, although it sees little…
Category: Ships
#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…
#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…
#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…
#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…
#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,…
#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…
#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…
#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…
#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…
Mechanical Landscapes 