Original negatives- underrated? Show yours

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Thought had read he was not supposed to sell any of the negatives for one of the archives

That may well have been the case with the Conlons. I know he had some sort of shared profit agreement with The Sporting News for the marketing of the Conlon images. That may have required him to keep the Conlon collection intact as well, but I just don't know.

Originally Posted by mikejanesphotography

Conlon is mostly together still, Brace/Burke though, you're right, it's a shame they were not scanned properly and a catalog was made before being sold! Do not see a way it could ever be done either - unless those who own Burke/Brace prints/negs scan and fans create a central website to house them, kind of put them together backwards. Expensive and massive though.

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

[Forever Young]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

Maybe we should try anyway. Even if 1/10 were scanned, it would be great. I mean.. I will contribute my 6!

[Keith_Loving]

Originally Posted by Forever Young

Maybe we should try anyway. Even if 1/10 were scanned, it would be great. I mean.. I will contribute my 6!

I bought three (3) original 5x7 George Burke negatives recently and I already have them scanned. At 2000 DPI resolution, the file size in PNG is 232MB and in JPG is 38.6 MB

I sent them off and had them professionally scanned and they turned out even better than I could have imagined. Cost was $105 for the company I picked online.

On a side note, there is a new owner in Illinois who picked up many many boxes (about half of the Burke negatives) from an auction, he was able to get them for around $45,000. I have made one attempt at contacting the company in search for a one particular player from the Cardinals, but I never got a response. I can link you to the article if anyone is wanting to read about this transaction. I had to "pay" for the article and so I probably will need to take a screen shot of it of you want to read it, else you will have to pay to read the article online.

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

I bought three (3) original 5x7 George Burke negatives recently and I already have them scanned. At 2000 DPI resolution, the file size in PNG is 232MB and in JPG is 38.6 MB

I sent them off and had them professionally scanned and they turned out even better than I could have imagined. Cost was $105 for the company I picked online.

On a side note, there is a new owner in Illinois who picked up many many boxes (about half of the Burke negatives) from an auction, he was able to get them for around $45,000. I have made one attempt at contacting the company in search for a one particular player from the Cardinals, but I never got a response. I can link you to the article if anyone is wanting to read about this transaction. I had to "pay" for the article and so I probably will need to take a screen shot of it of you want to read it, else you will have to pay to read the article online.

Definitely would like to see it! Talk about a community project, restore the collection to the best that it can be, be interesting to say the least. The fact he has that many is interesting, thought they were gone to the wind so to speak.

I'm surprised you paid that much to get them scanned, did they restore as well? I have a negative scanner and did it myself and then sent them off to a guy overseas who did them for $2-15/each. Did an absolutely spectacular job of restoring them. It would have cost about $85/each if done though a company in the U.S. that oddly uses the same labor overseas.

[Keith_Loving]

27 double sized shoe hoxes were recovered and sold at auction. Does anyone have a link as to how many shoe boxes there was in total when Mary sold them to John Rogers? I must believe this could be around half of the collection.

http://i65.tinypic.com/21omuqg.png

I don't really collect baseball cards on a whole, nor do I collect the popular players in the game. I just focus on one player for sentimental reasons. I wasn't willing to take a risk at loosing the George Burke negatives, nor was I willing to send them out of the country. I found a website that I liked whose state is adjacent to mine, and I went with it. ^.^ Security and peace of mind comes first, price isn't an issue because I had so few to be done. If I had a box of hundreds of negatives, then price would have become an issue. But I only have just the three.

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

27 double sized shoe hoxes were recovered and sold at auction. Does anyone have a link as to how many shoe boxes there was in total when Mary sold them to John Rogers? I must believe this could be around half of the collection.

http://i65.tinypic.com/21omuqg.png

I don't know how many negatives a "double-sized shoe box" contains, but the 250,000 total negative count that the article estimates for the entire Burke/Brace collection sounds about right.

I doubt that there were any HOFers remaining in the collection by the time the assets were sold, as one of the first things that Rogers did upon acquiring the archive was to pull those out and sell them. Perhaps some stars remained, but there were no doubt many lesser-known and rarely-photographed players in the mix that will never be re-grouped in any meaningful way.

[thecatspajamas]

What would be ideal (to my mind) would be to have a wiki-type website that could serve as a repository of baseball imagery of all types wherein contributors could upload images tagged with player ID's, year/team depicted, and photographer (if known). The Burke or Conlon section of such a website could then serve as an archive as desired above, with moderators and/or users having the ability to correct misidentifications and fill in missing information as needed.

The images themselves would probably have to be watermarked or locked in some way to prevent duplication for reasons of potential copyright infringement, but such a site would be a tremendous help to those researching player IDs, dates and uniform styles in their own photos. This would be particularly true if the images were cross-referenced with a site like baseball-reference or retrosheet.

Sadly, I do not have the programming capability to set up such a website, nor would I have the time to moderate in any meaningful way, but would be happy to contribute scans to such a worthy endeavor if one ever did emerge on the web.

[Keith_Loving]

Can someone tell me is 2,965 the complete Conlon collection? Just wondering if there are more?

http://www.gettyimages.com/search/mo...opular#license

[Forever Young]

Originally Posted by Keith_Loving

Can someone tell me is 2,965 the complete Conlon collection? Just wondering if there are more?

http://www.gettyimages.com/search/mo...opular#license

More original conlon images outside of neg collection? Yes.. nany more

[mikejanesphotography]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

That may well have been the case with the Conlons. I know he had some sort of shared profit agreement with The Sporting News for the marketing of the Conlon images. That may have required him to keep the Conlon collection intact as well, but I just don't know.

Even with fan/collector participation, such a project would never approach replicating the original archive. Even if one could contact every collector who has a portion of the archive, there are too many with the "1/1" attitude of wanting to be the only one who has a particular image that would not participate. The early negatives are also large enough that most desktop scanners cannot accommodate them, meaning the vast majority of collectors do not have a way of scanning the negatives, even if they are inclined to contribute to such a project.

Conlon - could be, never did see much of a follow up on the story to know more.

Brace/Burke - definitely, that's what would make it extremely expensive. Plus you couldn't just rely on negatives but would have to scan prints as well because those negatives may be lost in private collections or just gone (or 1/1 attitude). Guess that's kind of what the LOC did with the Bain collection, they have if it was scanned from the original negative or a print since some of the negatives ended up in collections. Even with a large amount of them scanned/restored and on a site, not sure what could do with it...except list who owns the original negative, or the print that it came from, if for sale, etc. Mary Brace probably still owns the copyrights to them all is my guess.

[TCMA]

I'm currently working with an archive containing hundreds of original glass plate negatives from the 30's. You may have seen some of my posts about this but here's a sampling:

Typical neg from the archive. Leo Durocher, St. Louis Cardinals:


Professionally cleaned and restored image of Sam Leslie, NY Giants in our proposed postcard size: