The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
This adorable photo depicts two children standing on Main Street in Dallas, likely sometime in the 1930s. They appear to be standing behind an advertisement for the Special Electric Telegraph Company, attempting to convince passersby to use the telegraph to send a message to a loved one for Valentine's Day. The text on the display, just barely legible in the photo, reads "Tell it the modern way - by telegraph" with the words "Valentine's Day" printed at the very bottom. Pictured behind the children is the Standard Paint & Paper Co., located at 2022 Main Street (now a parking lot), and across the street in the distance is the office complex at 2121 Main, construction of which was completed in 1930 and which is still standing today. I believe the photo is from the 1930s based not only on the office building, but on an advertisement that appeared in the 1930 Dallas City Directory. I purchased this original photo from a vintage collector back in January.
Looking east down Main Street, circa 1930
Today a parking lot sits at the former location of the Standard Paint & Paper Co., between the Masonic office building and the Municipal Court building. Buildup and traffic along the street makes it challenging to get the same shooting angle as in the original photo. Dallas has definitely changed in the past 90+ years.
Looking east down Main Street, March 2024
Despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to dig up any information on the Special Electric Telegraph Company. If you can point to any resources detailing when they were in business or where they were located, feel free to post a comment below.
Back in 2010, I stumbled upon some 110 film for sale inside a Mesquite Walgreens while visiting my parents. I was surprised to see it there and even more surprised to see that it was unexpired. I hadn't seen the format anywhere in years, and hadn't shot a cartridge of it since 1995. I ended up buying several boxes of the stuff and actually shooting four cartridges of it not long afterward at the Mochalux open mic, Curtain Club, and just around my apartment. It then sat dormant on a shelf for thirteen years before I finally got around to getting it developed. I hadn't planned on this - on more than one occasion over the past several years I had looked online for a lab that could still develop and possibly print the film, but I just never viewed it as a priority. I never bothered to freeze the film cartridges, so when I finally took some of them to Garland Camera to be processed and scanned, I wasn't expecting pristine color fidelity or high quality results. And by then, save for some of the shots from Mochalux, I had long since forgotten what had been recorded.
Continue reading "Salvaging old film photos"
I'm an informal collector of vintage and antique photo snapshots and slides. Professionally taken pictures of course have their own particular charm and value, but when I'm perusing antique malls and estate sales, it's the vintage stuff I'm on the lookout for. My tastes trend heavily toward depictions of places I have visited, historical oddities and one of a kind items, children/families, local history, and the occasional random, heartwarming or otherwise eye pleasing snapshot. I pick these up wherever I find them, whether at the aforementioned antique malls and estate sales, online listings, or anywhere else they happen to cross my path.
Here I present a selection of items from my vintage photo collection, all of which depict locations I've visited during my various road trips across the United States and Canada. They are accompanied by some of my own photos of the same or similar locations.
Grand Canyon, 1922
I visited the Grand Canyon's North Rim in October of 2021. The writing on one of my pair of antique photos identifies the views as having been recorded to film in June 1922, some 99 years prior to my visit.
Grand Canyon, June 1922
Continue reading "Scenes from my vintage photo collection"
This is an illustrated chronology of all the cameras I have used over the years from the very beginning up until the present day, with the exception of cell phones and one-offs taken using other people's equipment. I still have most of these in my possession.
1995
Kodak Tele-Instamatic 608
The camera I started with in late spring 1995. My original unit was my mother's old camera, which I used for a few months until light leakage problems became too serious to ignore. This was not a great photographic tool by any stretch, but we all have to start somewhere.
