Sponsored by
Ghosts from Yorkshire's past: A second set of forgotten photos for you to help identify
WE have had a tremendous response to our appeal for information on some key Yorkshire figures and scenes which digital technology has rescued from a forgotton photograpic past. So now, here's a second batch...
Click here to view second the Forgotten Photos gallery. There is a feedback button on each picture, which you can use to send us information
View the original Forgotten Photos gallery
Our second set contains 71 new images restored from the original photographic glass negatives. We have included such information as we know... but perhaps you know more.
Proper photography really started in 1841 when William Henry Fox Talbot patented the process known as Calotype. He used a sheet of high quality writing paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals. But the fibres of the paper often showed through in the prints making them mottled.
Ten years later, in 1841, the advent of glass negatives offered a sharper picture. In the beginning the glass plate was coated with egg white - albumen - excellent for fine detail but useless for moving images because of the long exposure required.
Glass negatives became a practical proposition in 1851 through the invention of the wet collodion process. The bad news for the poor old photographer was that it really was wet. It meant he had to cart around the potentially explosive coating solution, mix it on the spot and coat the glass negative with it just before he took the picture. The good news was that for the first time, the exposure before the camera shutter clicked could be counted in seconds rather than minutes.
In the 1880s glass negatives became more convenient with the introduction of the gelatin dry plate. The photographer could now buy glass plates ready-prepared and keep them by him until needed. Better still, action pictures were now possible because exposures could now be timed at fractions of a second.
Gelatin dry plates proved to be very durable. The plates - and the burden that they brought with them - were the norm for press photographers as late as the 1950s.
Once lightweight film arrived, the heavy wooden boxes and single shot glass cassettes were dumped with relief. Photographers embraced with enthusiasm the new pocket-sized rolls of film which suddenly made taking pictures an easier and more mobile experience.
At this point in the photographic timeline, there was a perception, a short-sighted one, that all those redundant, space consuming, heavy glass plates were expendable. No-one forsaw that they might have some value in the future.
They looked like a part of the past that could be safely junked. In 1970 to attempt to copy them all would have been massively time consuming and hugely expensive, not to mention slow and messy. In those days, before computers, it was impossible to imagine that within 25 years that thousands of the images on these cumbersome, heavy plates could be scanned and put onto wafer thin, conveniently sized, CDs.
And so it was that in 1970, when the Yorkshire Post moved from its premises in Albion Street, Leeds, to a new building on Wellington Street, that the unforgiveable cull of the glass plate archives took place.
Skips were filled with glass plates containing images which today we consider priceless. Yorkshire's unique pictorial history, as pieced together by numberless photographers working for the oldest continously run newspaper in the country, was crunched underfoot. Today we'd call it vandalism.
Nearly 40 years on, a recent rummage in the bowels of the Wellington Street premises unearthed a steel cabinet with trays of glass negatives mostly intact.
Although only a fraction of the stock that once existed, we had uncovered a collection in which someone had tried to retain at least some of the highlights of the glass plate era.
The dates and locations are hazy - only brief captions have survived written onto the envelopes containing the negatives. But but here we see amongst others, prime ministers, including Churchill, in Yorkshire, highlights such as the first Luftwaffe plane to be shot down in the war (over over Whitby), a captured u-boat in Hull and peacetime shots of the 1947 floods at Barlby and Sir Malcolm Campbell with his water craft in the Lake district.
These are not just fascinating fragments of social history. The sharpness of detail and lustrous quality of these black and white images almost put colour photography in the shade.
Click here to view second the Forgotten Photos gallery. There is a feedback button on each picture, which you can use to send us information
View the original Forgotten Photos gallery
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds lose Ward to Palace: Is there anyone they can afford now?
- Sheffield Wednesday leaving it late to hijack Leeds United over Ward
- As Snodgrass dithers over Leeds, Warnock throws a lifeline
- Ball is in Leeds United’s court over contract - Snodgrass
- Police turning blind eye to Asian voter fraud, says MP
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: East
