[HN Gopher] An abandoned cabinet full of Kodachrome slides in Sa... ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-20 23:00 UTC)