6/27/11

HAND TINTED photographs


If you follow my other blog, Tattered and Lost Ephemera, you'll know I've been focusing on nighttime postcard images. I bought a book called Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities which goes into some detail about how black and white photos shot during the day were often used for old postcards showing nighttime city scenes. A lot of photo manipulation was done to create the images, far more than I'd expected.

This got me thinking about hand tinted photos and what I have in my collection. Some of the tinting was done by professionals, but on the whole I believe most of it was done by regular folks hoping to enhance their photos, not always successful.

Over the next several days I'll be posting images of varying success. I'll leave it to you to determine on how well the job was done.

I have no information about this young lady. I do have two black and white photobooth shots of her taken when she was younger. I'm wondering if she did the hand tinting on this photo, making sure her striped skirt reflected what it looked like in real life. A slight blush to the cheeks, a blue hair ribbon peeking over the top of her "yellow" hair, and the decorative "needle work" on the front of her blouse. Interestingly, no color was added to her eyes.

Click on image to see it larger.

To see the postcard images click here, here, here, and here with more to come this week.

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