[HN Gopher] An abandoned cabinet full of Kodachrome slides in Sa...
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An abandoned cabinet full of Kodachrome slides in San Francisco
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-08-20 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > Swimmers in Fleishhacker Pool which closed in 1971.
|
| That's gotta be the biggest swimming pool I've seen. I was born
| in '74 (hello, fellow Gen X-er) and we went to various public
| pools through the summer. The biggest was an "olympic sized" pool
| 20min driving distance from our house - and this one looks double
| that from the camera's perspective.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Beautiful pictures. I would have loved to have shot Kodachrome
| before Kodak stopped manufacturing it; the closest we can get
| today is Ektachrome (which has also been reformulated over the
| years).
| shrubble wrote:
| I still have some Kodachrome slides and when you get the
| exposure right, and the scene is within the dynamic range ...
| it's something quite magical! Should scan them and put them
| online sometime...
| whyenot wrote:
| Kodachrome required a lot more equipment and chemicals to
| develop. There used to be a Kodak processing plant in Palo Alto
| on Page Mill Road. As a high school student, I applied for a
| job there and got a tour. I just remember a lot of equipment in
| dimly lit rooms. It was a big facility. I didn't end up getting
| the job and ended up working as a page at the pubilc library.
| dingaling wrote:
| Yes the saturation, detail and dynamic range is stunning.
| Digital is great in its own way, but never quite achieves the
| 'look' of slide.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yeah. It's all in the eye of the beholder, but I find
| Kodachrome/Ektachrome's saturated colors very aesthetically
| pleasing, while similarly saturated digital photographs come
| off as sterile and overly processed (the kind you'd see on a
| hotel's website).
| ghaff wrote:
| Ektachrome got a lot better over the years (starting with
| around the Lumiere era in the 90s) and, really, it was
| Kodachrome 25 that was special--which was obviously
| ridiculously slow by modern ISO standards.
|
| Always like KC 25 a lot more than the colors of Fuji's Velvia
| which while nominally ISO 50 was really about the same
| effective speed.
| fidotron wrote:
| It is kind of funny just how different Kodachrome and
| Ektachrome look though. To me Ektachrome seems cold while
| Kodachrome always looks like the 1970s in spite of the fact it
| was preferred by archivists because it remains stable in
| storage so well.
|
| Velvia was another film stock that seemed to have an outsized
| personality.
| gadders wrote:
| "Yeah, we found them in this weird old Armory place. Was just
| going to go through them with Mom."
| userbinator wrote:
| Quite lucky that that ended up on the street where someone could
| discover it instead of in a dumpster where it'd almost certainly
| never be seen again.
|
| As the old saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's
| treasure." The problem seems to be uniting those two people.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think Craigslist or Ebay was supposed to solve that problem,
| but:
|
| - Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the crap
| out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)
|
| - Ebay is full of scam artists and hucksters
|
| So... the problem persists.
| c22 wrote:
| _> - Craigslist is full of tire kickers who just annoy the
| crap out of you with stupid questions (for free things!!!)_
|
| In my experience listing your stuff for even a couple of
| dollars greatly reduces this problem. If I want to get rid of
| something on craigslist for free I just put it on the curb
| and post the address.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Paypal is an enabler for eBay scam artists. Try reporting
| something, it's hilarious, completely byzantine and it will
| only end when they have wasted enough time to say the case is
| too old and will be closed.
| 13of40 wrote:
| There's a house down the street from me who had a "free
| stuff" pile sitting outside for a month or two. Just a few
| things, but they got replenished over time, and I'm sure the
| ones that were never picked up went to the trash, so overall
| it seemed like it worked. We got some nice still-packaged
| outlets and dimmer switches from it.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I've read the article twice and can't seem to find how they know
| there are two other cabinets. Did James Martin's family tell them
| that there were two others his son dumped? Judging by the flyer
| he posted, he seemed to know there were two other cabinets before
| he even knew who they belonged to.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, there's a missing sentence or paragraph explaining it,
| but that was my impression too. The son who went rogue and
| purged the cabinets put three of them out on the street, only
| one has been recovered, according to the family. Something like
| that.
| hadlock wrote:
| Based on personal experience it seems like his sons would have
| a general idea of what was stored in the garage or attic.
| Considering he threw his brother under the bus to the city
| newspaper, I suspect he had been keeping an eye on those boxes
| for quite some time.
| msephton wrote:
| It's explained better at this link:
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/vault/article/lost-1960s-photos-...
|
| A different person found three, but only took one.
|
| Follow-up: https://www.sfchronicle.com/vault/article/san-
| francisco-phot...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| That explains it. Thank you.
|
| > Donnie Weaver, an artist who works with preschoolers, saw
| the shiny cabinets curbside and stopped short.
|
| > "I thought, 'Oh, what a cool box! ' " he remembered.
| "Because I like stuff from that era. I picked it up without
| really looking inside, opened it up when I got home, and
| thought, 'Oh, my God.' "
|
| > Weaver later ran back with a wheelie cart -- the cabinets
| weighed about 15 pounds each -- but the other two boxes were
| gone.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Dr. Caligari, perhaps?
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| All I can think of is that something on the cabinet indicating
| it was cabinet number 3/3? It seems they knew there were two
| others before the family came forward.
| pvitz wrote:
| Someone brought either the cabinet or the content of it to
| the collector. Most likely, they are the source of the number
| of cabinets.
| musictubes wrote:
| This is another example of someone's hobby/collection not meaning
| anything to people that inherit them. If you are a collector and
| getting older please give away or sell your collection to someone
| that cares about the same thing before it's too late.
|
| There have been innumerable collections of things that other
| collectors or historians would kill for that have been lost
| because they seem like junk to the people that inherit it. I have
| ended up collecting vacuum tubes and I almost weep at stories of
| warehouses of them being junked. There have been plenty of other
| things like comic books, LPs, cameras, etc. that faced a similar
| fate. And while I would never argue that collections of these
| things are all that important in the grand scheme of things
| collecting is fun and brings enjoyment. If nothing else selling
| them can bring in a few bucks.
|
| Losing historic pictures is just tragic. Any given historical
| image could prove to be important in some sort of research.
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(page generated 2023-08-20 23:00 UTC)