exweedfarmer

My faithful follower(s) will notice that many of my deviations have disappeared.  The artist to whom I owe the figures in these deviations was banned from DA for unknown reasons.  Subsequently, after submitting one of my deviations to a group it was rejected due to lack of proper citation as the source photo had been deleted.  To save anyone using my stock the same displeasure, I have deleted those works which incorporated parts of photos posted by the banned artist.

As for the remaining three images marked "Stock": two are marked JA and are generally attributed to Jean Angelou.  It is unclear if Jean Angelou was a photographer or a studio or a group of photographers but in any case, the JA mark seems not to have been used after 1925.  The third was taken from a daguerreotype and was most likely taken before 1860.  In so far as digital copyright is concerned, the digits in my works have no resemblance (other than coincidental) to anyone else's digits.  The coloring process is of my own invention and uses color sampling rather than algorithms and would completely alter the digital sequence even if reduced to monochrome again.  I will therefore make no further citations in my descriptions.

Did you ever wonder why old pictures look like "old" pictures.  I've been studying on it and my current hypothesis is that it's all a matter of lighting.  The first use of studio lighting I could find was 1854 in London.  It didn't work very well.  This was before the tungsten incandescent of Edison in 1879.  The reason that the artificial lights didn't work very well for photography is that silver emulsions of the time didn't react to light the way the human eye does.  Light from a carbon arc light is very blue which made the photo overly contrasted while the red/yellow light from a tungsten bulb would under contrast.  That problem was corrected (more or less) by the invention of panchromatic film and prints about 1926.  Before that the best photos were taken under natural light either direct or reflected.  But, natural light wasn't quite right either as the blue end of the spectrum exposed the negative more than the red.  The general pattern allows the mind to interpret the picture as a building or a naked lady but the shading is just a little off.  That's why it looks "old."  This is just my current working theory and I have been known to be wrong.

There's nothing sexy about these naked lady pictures.  The girls are pretty much all dead and that tends to put a damper on the old libido.  But they were beautiful for a moment. That moment was so long ago we can forgive them their occupation (the worlds oldest) and the thousand tiny missteps that may have lead them to it and focus on that beautiful blink of a shutter.  I may be taking liberties with that moment by coloring the models and placing them in weird backgrounds but one day I just may get one of these pictures just right, and then the moment will go on.

Since I started posting stock I suppose that I had better address copyright issues.  Copyright law is bizarre and frustrating as the folks who make the laws or enforce them don't seem to bother to read them.  I will not knowingly use a copyrighted work for my stock.  As the old pictures I use are monochrome and the end result is color, and the coloring process is one of my own design, I submit that my work is not derivative because color cannot be derived from black and white.  To the best of my knowledge a mechanical reproduction such as a copy of a picture is not copyrightable because it is not a creative process.  An improvement or enhancement of a public domain work if sufficiently different from the original may be copyrightable. I therefore try to use only unaltered pictures or pictures such as dA stock sources where permission for use has been granted. I submit that the stock I post will be at a pixel/digital level unique and original and of my own creation; even though they do look like old dead naked lady pictures.  So.... I think it will be okay if you use them.

Rules for using my stock:

Go, have fun, be free, unrestricted use is hereby granted (subject to permission of any other copyright holders if any) of any of my posted work containing the word "Stock:" in the title and having a solid red background.  If you use it a note or link would be nice but not required.

I try to stay pre-1930 with the models I select.  As a rule they come from the French Postcard era 1890-1930.  These picture were called "postcards" because of their size although some were used postally.  The girls were not always pretty or slim and tended to be on the shady side if reports are true.  Most of these pictures were taken in Paris and sold to American tourists.  The stock market crash of 1929 pretty much killed the tourist trade and the naked lady picture market declined.  It appears that many of the more notable photographers in the "nudge nudge wink wink" picture business used fictitious or assumed names such as Julian Mandel and Jean Angelou. These were not the sort of pictures you wanted your mother to know you were taking after all.

Something of interest to colorists that I just found out.  Until this defect was corrected in most film stock after 1930 the longer wavelengths of light closer to ultra-violet tended to expose the negative more heavily than the reds.  Consequently, in the positive print the blues will tend to be lighter.  I don't know how to deal with this information yet but I thought I would pass it along.

One day I hope to gather enough information to write a book on the subject but information is very hard to come by.  Right now I'm just trying to get accurate dates to just about any of the pictures to establish a timeline so if you are scanning an original postcard and happen to find a definitive date (such as a postmark) please include that information.  Sorry, but family history won't do.  Great grandpappy could have been taking a wild guess at the date.  Thanks in advance for any information you might have.