Pre-black Tuesday photos

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by prewarsports

Real photo postcards can be type 1 photos but not all of them. All the amtuer ones are, but some are "technically" not. It ALL depends on whether it was developed from the original negative or not, a hang up most people dont care about to be 100% honest with you. People use "Type 1" interchangably with "orignal" or "vintage" but A LOT of photos (included many ancapsulated as type 1) are not actually type 1 under the strictest definitions.

Having said that, you postcard of Fenway with the players identified is certainly a type 1, assuming the back is of the proper age and it was not developed later on. Your Hilltop park probably is not, depending on whether the lettering was applied to the negative or whether it was developed, words added to a print and then a photo taken of that print to make others with the words on it. Those are some ornate letters to have been either etched, or written backwards on a glass playe negative for it to be a real "type 1". It will grade a "type 1" for sure but I bet it is actually not which is why that system is flawed.

(note: I dont hate the system and Henry and others who helped develop it did the best with what knoweldge they had at the time, but there are loop holes in it that can make Lots of problems if you get hung up on the number system when buying postcards, composites, and news service photos)

Rhys

+1

A couple other thoughts on the subject:

I might also add that there are at least some instances where a more ornate design can be applied to the negative by stamping directly onto the negative, in which case the stamped image or text appears white in the developed photo due to the ink of the stamp blocking light from passing through the negative in that area during the developing process. George Burke applied his studio stamp to his earlier images in this way so that it appears in the obverse image, and I have one of his early negatives (when he was still using glass plates) that has his stamp applied this way. I have also had several of his 8x10's though that were hand-lettered as Rhys describes for duplication, along with the matching postcard-sized 2nd Generation print that then had the lettering "in" the image after being re-shot. In that case, with the reprint being smaller, there was little to no noticeable degradation of the image, though you could in fact see faint traces of the guide lines he laid down on the original so that his lettering would be straight.

In looking at the print that appears in a photo, if the print is black and very neat, it seems to me that there would be very little chance of that having been done on the original negative (since to have black text, you would have to etch, scratch, or otherwise completely remove any obscuring matter so that light would pass through the negative cleanly to produce the black text). With white text, it's still more likely for it to be written (or painted) on the original photo and re-shot, especially the neater the printing (as Rhys also pointed out).

Now, enough discussion, and back to our regularly-scheduled show-and-tell

This one is of Joe Schepner of the 1929 Knoxville Smokies, which goes along with my penchant for obscure and minor league player images, as well as being tied to the East Tennessee city that I grew up in: