The Good, The Bad and the Difficult to Restore; Some "New" Old Photographs
Cleaning (literally) 100 years of dirt from the glass of a Magic Lantern Slide is an interesting proposition; and, if you haven't seen my previous articles on these pieces of yesteryear, again
I recently acquired roughly 1000 Magic Lantern Photographic Slides .
Magic lanterns , also known as optical lanterns, provided one of the most popular forms of entertainment during their heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, establishing many of the first 2-D special effects.
Using an artificial light source and a combination of lenses, these devices enlarged small transparency images or miniature models and projected them onto a wall or screen.
While most magic lanterns were designed as simple wooden boxes fitted with a handful of precision brass parts, a few were ornately decorated with exotic painted scenes or engraved metal casings.
And, here's what the slides themselves look like
In 1850, two Daguerreotypists in Philadelphia, William and Frederick Langenheim, invented a transparent positive image of a photograph in the form of a glass slide that could be projected onto a wall or screen using a Magic Lantern. The practice of using Magic Lanterns to project images on glass plates was by no means new. As early as the 17th century, glass slides had been projected using a Magic Lantern.
To date, I've scanned about thirty of the slides I acquired, and I'm learning as I go. Cleaning the glass that sandwiches the images does not always mean that a perfect scan and digital file will result -- but it's the important first step. Scanning a dirty slide means extra digital cleaning and restoration ... better to remove as much dirt as possible befor scanning.
Then, there's whatever is going on between the glass sandwich; if there's dirt on the inside of the front piece, it might be worth it to slit the tape holding the pieces of glass together and cleaning it. It's a judgement call as to whether to do this or, after making a scan, cleaning the digital file using Photoshop.
The ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH resides on the INSIDE -- on an emulsion layer on the rear glass. DON'T MESS WITH THIS lest you destroy the image itself!
Okay enough technical stuff. Here are today's images.
The Main Canal of the Danube River, Nuremberg, Germany, 1903
Boats in the Seine River, Paris, 1903
NOTE: Because I own the original photographs (the slides) and their digital counterparts, while I can't claim the copyrights as the photographer, I can legally claim them for reproduction and marketing purposes.
Tags
Who is online
312 visitors
Hope you like them.
I LOVE them!!! I want to go down the Danube and see what was there...
These are lovely, dear A. Mac!
I remember seeing a special about the origins of American Film on PBS, and they talked a little about Magic lanterns,,really interesting. It didn't get into much detail and I wondered then how the picture was actually made...
....; now I see...!
:~)
Nice work A. Mac.; Seems like it must be rewarding work.