Flickr and The Library of Congress announced a project together to put a whole load of the Libraries photos up and to ask the public to create meta data for these photos – tags, notes etc.
This is a phenomenal achievement for Flickr in my mind, looking through these photos there are some really absolutely amazing shots showing American life in the early 1900s, depression years, the war etc.
I spent some time over lunch browsing some of these, the machinery, clothes, culture, cars, architecture, it is all just amazing I wish there were such a good record of the UK available to the public.
Some of the images are just great to look at like the one below from 1911, that’s a hand held large format camera, amazing.
Others show the truly amazing work that photographers did in those days and frankly makes me wish I can even come close to this kind of shot on my digital cameras.
Click on these images and look at them, they are phenomenally well done the richness and dynamic range of color in those shots far out paces the results I tend to see on digital. I wish self developing color slides wasn’t such a pain else I’d start doing medium format color transparencies right away.
