Love it! Thanks for sharing these! Nice to see all of those old pictures, - obviously don't know anyone in them, but the fact that there are people in them doing daily things makes them interesting. The question now is whether these pictures were coloured or if they originally were black and white, - which is what I think they all would have been considering how expensive colour film was and how few processing centres there were that could handle colour film. Besides, to a lot of people under the age of 50 the world was black and white, you'd be surprised to know just how may of them actually believe that! One thing about a retouched or colourized picture is the absence of shadows; - or at least they don't right if they still are there. The lighting tends to go a bit haywire when put through some computerized filters, it comes out "perfect" in the end result. A lot of these pictures would have been shot with cheap Brownie Boxes or some early form of fixed focus instamatic, so there would have been a lot of blurred areas, under or overexposed shots that would have benefited from some serious cleaning up. Very few people had "good" quality SLR or rangefinder style cameras, Kodak did booming business with cheap but half decent quality cameras in those days. Still; - coloured as these are, they still are great pictures, and enhanced like this are probably a lot more interesting than the originals were.
The photos are from Dave Gelinas who is a regular contributor over on the BCA forums, so I don't think these are colorized. He typically has high quality kodachrome slides that are scanned.
In defense of my fellow members of the under 50 club, they may have had grandparents like mine that liked to tell us funny things like this which in hindsight is one of my favorite memories of foolish things I believed as a little kid. I love that I'm sure it gave my grandparents a good laugh too. Great photos though, I really like watching those kind of videos and seeing the people/houses/cars etc from back then. I wasn't around yet but that kind of history fascinates me.
Yeah, I'm familiar with Kodachrome, I collected vintage cameras and using Kodachrome in a 1936 Leica IIIa with an uncoated pre-war Elmar lens was always a treat. The pastel hues you'd get were incredible. The problem was finding someone who could process it properly, and by the late 80s that was getting to be a problem around here. I still have the Leica and a few rolls of unused film in the freezer. It's still my favorite old camera followed by an Ihagee Exakta from the mid 50s. For rollfilm there's an old Rolleicord from 1947; I just recently bought a Pentacon 6 TL but haven't gotten round to try it out yet. The problem there is now I would have to send the film away to get it developed, there's no one in our area who even has a darkroom anymore. The other problem is I'm actually a terrible photographer, I have no "eye" for composition or a good shot. It's definitely a talent, and it's one I don't have and couldn't get right no matter how many books I read on the subject back then.
