| General > General Technical Chat |
| Colorized video footage of San Francisco from 1906(?) Can we confim the date? |
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| Ed.Kloonk:
The video (indeed the whole channel) is very interesting by itself. However this is in the description.. --- Quote ---New Version of footage San Francisco 1906, A Trip Down Market Street, Shot on April 14, 1906, four days before the San Francisco earthquake and fire. From the front of a cable car, a motion picture camera records a trip down Market Street, San Francisco, California, from a point between 8th & 9th Streets, Eastward to the cable car turnaround at the Ferry Building, --- End quote --- Further down in the description links the original b/w print scan source from 2018: https://archive.org/details/MarketStreet19064KScan20181016 Which leads to a particular comment: --- Quote --- Reviewer: mattydread - November 1, 2018 Subject: 1906? Doubtful... It's very unlikely this is 1906. Look at the number and type of cars. In 1906, the streets would still have been mostly full of horse-drawn vehicles. The cars of that time would have been very rudimentary and few and far between. Furthermore, I believe I see Model T's driving around and they didn't come on the scene until 1908. Therefore, this film probably dates from the early teens. By that time, San Francisco had largely been rebuilt with the masonry, stone facades you see in this film - the wooden buildings having burned in 1906. Finally, the film quality itself is way too good for 1906. Movie-making was likewise in it's infancy - and film of that time are short, poorly exposed. Still in all - interesting and worthy! --- End quote --- What do you think? |
| Stray Electron:
First, I didn't watch the entire video. I'm not going to spend the time on it. But I did look at the photo shown in your post and it clearly doesn't match what I saw of the first part of the video. But FWIW I have seen colorized photos of San Francisco that were very shortly taken after the 1906 earthquake. Those photos had also been "photoshopped" to show less damage than what actually occurred! IIRC it was some kind of publicity move by the city father's to discourage out of state businesses from moving taking their business to other areas that they thought would be safer. It was in a documentary about the 1906 earthquake. The clock tower in the photo that you posted should be an easily identifiable landmark. Find out where is, or was, and what happened to the surrounding area during the earthquake. That should tell you if this photo was taken before the 1906 earthquake or not. But FWIW I don't see any signs of damage in the photo and I know that very few parts of SF escaped damage in the earthquake so my initial impression is that this probably is a pre-earthquake scene. |
| free_electron:
they're still driving like that. crazy town |
| BrokenYugo:
If all this stone construction went up post earthquake, then it shouldn't be too hard to date some of the buildings to confirm. |
| TimFox:
For color photographs: "Autochrome" was the first commercially available process, introduced in 1907. It is a positive transparency process that used colored grains of starch that acted both as an exposure filter to the silver-halide underneath and a viewing filter after the monochrome silver halide layer was developed and removed from the glass plate, leaving the colored grains on the other surface. Exposure is very slow, maybe 10 to 30 times slower than standard monochrome emulsions of that era. Color photographs have been made before that, using hand-tinting of the monochrome print. Marshall Oils are still made for that purpose, being formulated to work well with the surface of b/w prints. https://www.dickblick.com/products/marshalls-photo-oils/ |
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