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Great find. Thanks for posting. I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast major
by Normille 5y ago
Great find. Thanks for posting.
I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.
- Borrible 5y agoSome were stiff. https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-tradition-of-photographing-the-dead-a89adc507aac https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-trad...
- jorgesborges 5y agoIt’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec
- KMnO4 5y agoHere’s one from 1895, upscaled to 4k60 and colourized: https://youtu.be/EqbOhqXHL7E https://youtu.be/EqbOhqXHL7E
- mlindner 5y agoThese are horrible.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoThe original seems to no longer be on YouTube; do you have a copy of a non-AI-hallucinated version?
- petilon 5y agoMuch better ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ1OgQL9_Cw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQs5VxNPhzk
- mlindner 5y agoI really hate these types of videos that ruin a perfectly good video and fill it with AI-generated fake frames and colors. Colorization especially is not something that an AI can do well yet. It generally turns it into a rainbowy mess of constantly shifting colors. Also even the framerate is often wrong as these old movies didn't have consistent framerates. They were hand cranked so the framerate varied quite a bit.
- WalterBright 5y agoWould be fun to film the same route today, and show them side by side.
- thangalin 5y agoHere's a landmark: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.425502,-123.3676965,3a,21.3y,3.28h,90.43t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-1KkfrCjt_eDXLBILkpzPw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@48.425502,-123.3676965,3a,21.3y... https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec?t=94 https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec?t=94
- eloeffler 5y agoThere's a side-by-side video of the Wuppertal "flying train" from 1902 and 2015 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc
- cm2187 5y agoIn fact that's the only interesting photos from old albums (that and people you know). A 100,000th photo from the Eiffel tower will be the least interesting thing you will find (unless it happens to be a landmark that disappeared). But life in the street of Paris in the 60s is really interesting and amusing to contrast to today.
- eru 5y agoSimilarly, the most interesting part of old magazines is often the ads.
- mywacaday 5y agoGiven how quiet the roads and pavements are in the video and photos does anyone know why the streets were built so wide?
- martyvis 5y agoDelivery wagons might be drawn with a team of two or even four horses (or even bullocks). You'd want to be able to turn them around in such streets. Certainly that was the case for Australian country town main streets laid down in the 1800s
- zamber 5y ago> added in sound for ambiance The actual noise levels may have been higher. Regardless, I think the main reason is ventilation. With coal and wood heating streets were designed to act as valleys pushing air through. Also, I hard that old European cities were built with airflow in mind. Whole streets were uninterrupted with trees while some have them. Also I heard an opinion that Wrocław is one of the most polluted cities because it got a lot of new buildings that break the airflow on main streets.
- drran 5y agoNo lanes, no rules, no turn signals, pedestrians are walking everywhere, every transport had it own speed and size, etc. And lots of goo on the road.
- erikprotagonist 5y agoDuring the 1800s there were four sets of building regulations (or rather, laws) for Christiania (the name of Oslo back then), which regulated everything from the width of the streets to how many floors buildings could be. In 1827 the minimum street width became 11.35m, then 12.60 in 1842, 15.75 in 1875 and 20m in 1899. (https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murbyen_(Oslo) https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murbyen_(Oslo) has a good overview). The background for the regulation was the switch from unregulated wood buildings to requiring mainly brick as building material - there were some major fires before using bricks became the law. I live just around the corner from one of the photos - the building in that photo hasn't changed much since back then.
- pessimizer 5y agoWithout the posed stiffness, the major thing remaining that makes them look 19th century is that they're all drowning in cloth; lots of thick layers.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> the major thing remaining that makes them look 19th century is that they're all drowning in cloth; lots of thick layers. Aren't they in Oslo?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- progre 5y agoMost of these looks like early summer photos though. Temperatures likely around 20C.
- The_Colonel 5y ago> early summer That seems quite specific. How do you tell? From what I see it's probably not winter (lack of snow), not autumn (lack of leaves on the ground). But that still leaves a pretty long time period with a bigger range of temperatures.
- jb1991 5y agoSummers are pretty short in that part of the world.
- 8372049 5y agoDepends on what you mean by 'short'. I think you're probably thinking of much further north in Norway. Summers in Oslo are usually from May or June to August. Sometimes there's 20+ C in March, sometimes it's 5 C in May. Night frost usually sets in around late October/early November, with snow usually arriving in November or December. Snow is usually gone by or during March. Apparently the average temperature in 1890 was 1.3 C colder than it is now. Source: Born and living in Oslo.
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoProperly exposing the plate—or whatever—took several seconds, and it's way easier to look dour for five seconds than to hold a rictus grin. Source: Among other things, I've sat for a tintype portrait before. https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/photo https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/photo
- Markoff 5y agono, this is myth as clearly proven by these photos, it took pretty much no time to expose film/plate already in 19th century
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoPhotographic technology developed rapidly between the heyday of tintype (1870s'ish) and when these pictures were made (1890s). See my other reply for some readings to learn more about late 19th century photography. (Also, photography was invented in the 19th century. I'm not sure why you make such sweeping claims about a whole century when exposures went from taking hours to fractions of a second over the course of it.)
- inglor_cz 5y agoTintype is a different technology. By the 1890s, it would have been as obsolete as rotary landline phones are today. I think the reason is different, because even I, as a kid in the early 1980s, was taken to a photo shop for "official shots", well dressed and told to behave. It was a bit unnatural, yes. People in staged shots are generally a little stiff.
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoOf course a tintype is a different technology from fast film or plates, or whatever this photographer was using. However, you're incorrect about the lack of usage in the timeframe specified: "Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype Besides, the GP comment referred to the era, to which I was responding. Your explanation is not without merit, however: "One common explanation for the lack of smiles in old photos is that long exposure times — the time a camera needs to take a picture — made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible. That way, the picture wouldn't look blurry." — https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs
- nothis 5y agoWhat confuses me: These are good photos! Many are sharp, well lit. And they were made from a pocket camera of people who didn't specifically stand still for the photo. Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.
- Cederfjard 5y agoThe first photograph successfully fixed to a substrate was in the 1820s, and the commercially viable daguerreotype came in the 1830s, so photography had been around a while in the 1890s.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoCertainly for a tintype the subjects needed to be well lit and the exposure was still long. Perhaps this persisted as habit even after the development of colloidal photography? Yeah, I am even now a little suspicious of the photos authenticity for this reason.
- periheli0n 5y agoYou will notice that most of the photopgraphs have been made in direct sunlight. So he could have used high aperture and short shutter time. Most likely it was a fixed-aperture and shutter setup, since he could hardly have adjusted anything while shooting covertly. Still, not all of the photos are sharp, some do have motion blur, and some have grain, perhaps from pushing during development (i.e. correcting slightly underexposed shots). But the technical basis was definitely on top of the game at the time, under the given conditions.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoIf you flip this around a bit... why would people think to smile for photographs? They're not looking dour, they're just sitting for a photo with their natural faces. Their main points of reference were drawn or painted portraits that people also didn't smile for (partially due to the amount of time you'd need to pose). Smiling for photographs is a social behavior that took time to catch on.