Many found photographs

The Suez Canal Defence Monument at Ismalia, Egypt. The monument was designed by the French, is 50 meters high, 240 meters long and used 4,700 tons of granite in the building. The monument was erected to commemorate the defence of the Canal Zone from the threat of the Turkish Army in WWI."

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Port Said, Office of the Suez Canal Company.

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Lamp seller Port Said.

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Back in 2011 I scanned the contents of another Leica negative album which belonged to my dad. At the time I just post processed a couple of pictures but last week I redid the whole lot. I'm particularly interested in them because they mainly are pictures of ME!

Typically...

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We are talking seriously cute here.

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Time to move on to the next batches of found negatives, something like 500 I would say in 120 and 127 format.
 
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Still haven't moved on to the hundreds of black and white negatives, and I have since bought a few more.

Here is a scanned stereo plate from a set labelled Scotland 1911. I've had to edit the original scan, crop, spot, adjust exposure, before using StereoPhoto Maker to align the images. I have reduced the size of the blank middle section and filled it in black in the hope that the side can be postprocessed but the subsequent anaglyph and Holmes stereo images are flawed. You will need a pair of anaglyph spex and/or a stereo viewer, for example a London Stereoscopic OWL, to view the images in 3D.

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Too much separation.


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Not sure why there is a pronounced black band in the left image although, when printed at 6x4, it is viewable.


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StereoPhoto Maker is a very complex application with a pretty poor user interface. I don't know of an alternative.
 
@PeterSpencer

Peter,

I think the positioning is not correct.

For the colour separation version, the distant objects (such as the apex of the shed roof) should be co-incident. The largest separation of images should be for the closest objects (such as the man's arm) - where on the version presented there is none. That's going to mess with your mind (though for all I know the human mind might be able to cope, 'cos we're all a bit weird).

For the side by side image, the roof apex should be same distance apart as the centre to centre distance as the viewing optics (or our eyes for those clever bods capable of viewing directly - not me). I think that's 75mm for the OWL viewer, but I don't have mine to hand at present.

I hope that helps
 
Thanks. A good idea to get the far objects coincident. With the next batch of stereo scans I'll see what happens using manual alignment rather than automatic.
 
You will need a pair of anaglyph spex and/or a stereo viewer, for example a London Stereoscopic OWL, to view the images in 3D.

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Or just look at it from the right distance. Took me only a few seconds to see this one in 3D. The trick is to relax your eyes, let the two images drift towards each other, then concentrate on the image forming in the middle.
 
Now for a foreign holiday. Tenerife no less.

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The photographer might have been staying at a less costly apartment near the back of the complex, if the other photographs are anything to go by. If he was lucky the picture might be taken from his apartment.
Hope you don't mind ... but used google image search and got this...

HOTEL CATALONIA PUNTA DEL REY​

Avenida Marítima, 165, 38520 Las Caletillas, Spain - Las Caletillas
 
Man reading the North Mail but I suspect not in Whitley Bay! Blown up sections might give a clue as to the date and location

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That's Biarritz, with the Bellevue Casino in the background


The headlines in the newspaper suggest it's 1938; it looks like the Sudetenland crisis that led to the Munich conference in September (and 'Peace in our time' for another 12 months). Mussolini introduced a raft of legislation discriminating against Jews around then.

Edit: more precisely, it appears to be during the Runciman Mission to Prague in August 1938.

 
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There’s an article in an Australian website that dates the decree that forced 10,000 Jews to leave Italy to be 10th September 1938.
 
There’s an article in an Australian website that dates the decree that forced 10,000 Jews to leave Italy to be 10th September 1938.

I think I found the same site.

They have reports that Helein's visit to Hitler took place on Friday, 2nd September


Wikipedia has an entry for Mussolini's expulsion of the Jew being declared on Thursday, 1st, as reported by the Chicago Tribune


Certainly it's looking like the first week of September
 
The other car, judging by the radiator mascot, is a Hispano Suiza, very up market.
Thanks. The actor Peter Ustinov had a Hispano Suiza tourer I remember so I looked it up on't internet. His was a fabulously rare J12 which, unsurprisingly, shares some styling features with that in the picture. The J12 was much bigger though. More information on the J12 on Wikipedia.
 
Actually, many thanks to everyone for your research. It's nice to have some context for the photographs.

By the way, I should have describe the Ustinov Hispano as a 'grand tourer' not just any old tourer.
 
Just scanned 90+ 6x6 negatives. These came in a CELLOFILE album which hasn't done them any favours. You can get an idea how it works here.

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To me it looks like the negatives weren't properly dry when they were filed, some are badly stained. The sleeves are very brittle and many of them have stuck to the non-emulsion side of the very crinkly negatives, but fortunately not the emulsion side. You might be able to see the worst of the effect on the negative above. However, it has been possible to remove most of the fragments of cellophane from the negatives and I'm sure I can recover most of the shots. I think the way to fix the problem properly would be to wash the negatives but this would be a lot of work and the subject matter doesn't really merit a full scale recovery job. I've found some 6x6 glassine sleeves to put them in.
 
Thanks, I'll take a look at that. Such a shame that wasn't obvious when the photographer decided to use this storage method for his negatives. He(?), should I say they, was a cautious photographer and took two or three versions of each shot so I think, overall, the recovery rate will be quite good. I'll post some in due course.
 
I see what you mean, cellophane is a bad choice for archival storage. I imagine that the album might have been stored in a loft, to make matters worse.
 
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This set was spotted manually from flatbed scans. It's a painful process which I spent thousands of hours doing.

Then, this afternoon, I tried the Photoshop beta neural filter and I think, from the point of view of spotting it might be transformative!

I'll put a comparison up soon.
 
I've found some 6x6 glassine sleeves to put them in.
I saw a post/tweet or something from my county's archives saying they had removed some negatives from glassine sleeves as they are not archival standard. I can't find the post to see what they were going to use instead. If your negs are important it might be worth contacting your county archive for more info.
 
This set was spotted manually from flatbed scans. It's a painful process which I spent thousands of hours doing <<<< not spending thousands of hours on this particular set but on all the negatives I have.

Yes, possibly glassine is suspect. On the other hand I have lots of negatives in glassine sleeves without issues.
 
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