On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
It looks like Bill had some fun this week doing something completely different. Lucky us! ~WaterGirl
?BillinGlendaleCA
From the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, when color photography was either unavailable or prohibitively expensive, hand tinting photos was a means to get a color photo of those special occasions or for postcards of tourist spots. Often the person who tinted the photos for postcards was not the photographer and had never been to the location in the photo so the color would be ‘off”.
I’ve attempted to recreate that style digitally by converting my color photos to Black and White and the colorizing them via software so that they have an color somewhat independent from the original color. I combine the black and white photo with the colorized photo and blur the color to reduce the digital “look”.
Using this technique I’ve produced postcards of historic buildings and views from Southern California as well as our State Capitol in Sacramento.
Downtown LA with snowcapped San Gabriels from the Baldwin Hills.
Royce Hall at UCLA.
California State Capitol in Sacramento.
Chapel at the University of Redlands.
Mission Santa Barbara reflected in the fountain.
Mission San Luis Rey near Oceanside California.
The Stagecoach Inn in Thousand Oaks California.
Le Mesanager winery barn at Deukmajian Wilderness Park in the Crescenta Valley, California.
Baud
Very cool.
raven
nice
HinTN
Big fun. Those are very true to that era. Well done.
Wanderer
Really cool and creative. I love postcards.
TheronWare
Ah those beautiful mountains!
BretH
Takes me back to places I’ve never been. Also to dusty postcard racks in 5-and-dime Stores encountered during my family’s summer camping trips.
Albatrossity
Wow, those are great! And a trip down memory lane. My father worked in a photography studio for most of his life, and took a lot of portraits. Some of them were colorized by a woman whose name was Violet; if I was ever told her last name, it is lost to me. She had a palette of paints in a metal enameled case, and a very tiny-tipped paintbrush, which she would often wet by touching it to the tip of her tongue. I was fascinated to watch that process, and by the amazing color of her tongue by the end of it!
randy khan
These are a lot of fun. Thanks!
arrieve
I love this technique! I love that surreal look of old postcards and this really captures it.
dnfree
Those are really cool! My senior picture in 1963 was colorized like that, and I wonder why. We had been taking regular photos in color for a long time, so why were formal portraits taken in black and white and then either colored by hand or sepia-toned?
mvr
Thanks! Those are nicely done. And remind me of enjoying California on various trips.
JPL
Bill, They’re excellent!
@BretH: I loved those.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Thanks.
@raven: I done one for each of the missions I’ve visited, but the one for San Juan Capistrano(of the bells) isn’t right since there’s no ivy there now, but there was when I visited in 1968. I’m checking out how to add ivy.
@HinTN: Using the colorizing software(I buy it and then Adobe puts a colorizing feature in Photoshop), really works to give that “off color” look rather than just a faded look. It work well most of the time, other times, not so much.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Wanderer: Thanks, I was sort of inspired by the hand tinted photo of my dad and my aunt when they were toddlers that I have(it’s probably 100 years old).
@TheronWare: That was a particularly good bit of snow on the San Gabriels, we had a very cold storm blow though on Boxing Day last year.
@BretH: I’m happy that these photos could invoke those memories, that means I did a pretty good job.
JaneE
I remember the snowy San Gabriels. When I was a kid that was every winter.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Albatrossity: Thanks. It was really interesting to learn that the tinter had no idea of what the actual color in the photo was, so having the software somewhat choosing the color as opposed to doing it manually in Photoshop worked pretty well. If I had tried to do it, I’d probably get too close to the original color. I was happiest with the Stagecoach Inn photo.
@randy khan: It was a fun idea that I decided to just run with, sometimes it even actually works!
@arrieve: It worked for some photos but some it didn’t. I tried to do the Korean Friendship Bell in San Pedro and it lost too much color…I ended up adding color from the original photo.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dnfree: All the family pics that I have(all 2 of them) that were hand tinted are over 100 years old. I’m not sure why they’d do that in the early 60’s. Maybe to make them more of a keepsake?
@mvr: Thanks, I love showing of my state.
@JPL: Thanks, I wasn’t sure if anybody other than myself would like these, I really do appreciate the feedback.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JaneE: We still get snow on the San Gabriels every winter, a lot of those peaks are over 8,000 feet. That was after a very cold storm and the snow level was down to about 2,000 feet.
JanieM
Very cool.
I took an epic train trip from Ohio to California in 1961, when I was 11, with my grandma and two other “old” (younger than I am now) Italian ladies. They brought shopping bags full of provisions — e.g. sausage and fried green pepper sandwiches on their own homemade bread, and I forget what-all else. It was about three days on the train, with a change in Chicago and an hours-long stop in Albuquerque, where I saw Americans who weren’t either black or white for the first time. No sleeper car, just our seats, turned so the four of us made a little living area out of the space.
I stayed a month with my aunt and uncle in Fullerton. They took me to Disneyland, San Juan Capistrano, Knotts Berry Farm, Olvera Street, and the ocean. We drove to Las Vegas for Christmas because one of our relatives was performing there.
It’s like you’ve recreated the California I saw then — the pictures are just hauntingly evocative.
Thanks for bringing up so many almost-lost memories.
JustRuss
Love that shot of the snow on the San Gabriels. A crisp, clear winter day in LA is just magical.
frosty
Neat idea! They’re all good, but I think you really nailed it with the Stagecoach Inn postcard.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JanieM: Glad that I was able to invoke pleasant memories. Maybe I’ll have to do another set with some of the other missions, though I really need to add ivy to San Juan Capistrano.
@JustRuss: It is, I spent the whole day driving around that day, starting with sunrise at Griffith Observatory. The rain clears out all the crap out of the skies.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@frosty: Yup, I like the Stagecoach Inn the best.
JanieM
@?BillinGlendaleCA: These pictures are running around in the back of my mind as I move through my day, triggering interesting speculations about the relationship between images and memories. I didn’t actually see most of these places on that trip, and the sky was never really that color, etc. And yet the images trigger memories just the same, for a bunch of reasons like the vividness of the landscape, which was so foreign to me, and because they look so much like the postcards I sent home to my family during that month, or the style of postcards all of us of a certain age were familiar with in childhood. (Phone calls were expensive!)
Very powerful. I wish I had the patience you do, to work on projects like this!
J R in WV
Great stuff, Billin. Keep up the good work!
These remind me of rumageing through old photos in the many antique and junk stores in Bisbee and other old mining towns in AZ. Lots of those towns appear to be basing their economy on selling old stuff abandoned by people moving away after the mine/smelter/RR closed to each other.
And coffee, you can buy a good cuppa to carry while digging into boxes of family pictures left behind. No one will ever know who is in those pictures!
Kind of sad… I have boxes of family photos like that, even I don’t know who many of the people are for sure. And no kids to pass them on to either.
ETA: No, you don’t have to add ivy to San Juan Capistrano, ivy is terrible for buildings, it ruins the walls it grows into.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JanieM: After a few searches on the Google, the process to create this effect isn’t that hard(the hard part is getting the B/W base right). I’m glad you enjoyed them.
@J R in WV: If they remind you of that stuff, I succeeded! The reason I’d want to add ivy to the pic of Mission San Juan Capistrano is that it used to have ivy there. I’m sure they removed it due to it damaging the structure. If you’re going for a vintage look, you need to make it look like the time frame. I don’t have any photos of the mission from that time period(I visited in 1968), but I remember that it had ivy there and raven posted a pic of his that confirmed my memory(I think his may have been from the 50’s).
stinger
Oh, well done, BillinGlendaleCA! I feel like I could flip them over and stick a stamp on the back!
BigJimSlade
You need to paste in some old-style, hat-wearing tourists ;-)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@stinger: Thanks, I’m happy they worked and you like’em.
@BigJimSlade: Just no MAGA hats.
Albatrossity
Coincidentally, this was a Twitter thread today
https://twitter.com/greekchungus/status/1319048942009679872
Richard
Those were nice. Thank you. I’m from there. We didn’t know what was coming. One good thing that we did, was clean the air a little. There were days when you couldn’t see the mountains or even 2 blocks away.
Smog, we called it. Just like now, we had the same idiots that would resist even the most basic inconveniences to help the people.