The past did not take place in black-and-white, but many of the technologies for documenting that past when it was present operated in that way. But in our age of never-ending marvels we can right the egregious errors of such out-moded systems. So it is that the colourisation of black-and-white actuality films and photographs hasRead More
Last in this series looking back on 2018 is the year in images. St Helena, Ireland, the Lake District, around Kent, working in London, and much reading. My pictures (bar one), my memories. Most of the photographs I take end up on my Flickr site, for anyone who might be interested (all under a CreativeRead More
It’s great to be able to report that the number of Charles Urban catalogues freely available online is growing. Charles Urban – just in case you didn’t know – was an Anglo-American film producer who specialised in non-fiction and educational film in the first twenty or so years of cinema. I manage a website aboutRead More
Why sit on stuff when you can give it away and be useful? Well exactly, and so I’ve been uploading some of my Charles Urban images to a new folder on Flickr. As well as plundering my digital archive, I’ve been copying and pasting images from Urban’s 1903 film catalogue, We Put the World BeforeRead More
Why have I expended all this effort in writing when I could more easily communicate with images? I’ve been looking at the statistics for the photographs and other images that I have on Flickr, and collectively they have generated 233,869 views over a period of six-and-a-half years. That seems quite a substantial number to me.Read More
Back in July last year I had an idea. I had been interested for many years in eyewitness accounts of people’s experiences of cinema-going. I’d collected a lot of these while researching the early years of cinema in London, treasuring the special quality they had for making history come to life in all its untidy,Read More
Seasonal greetings from The Demon McGuire, a poem published (anonymously) in Sydney in 1885, with some fantastical illustrations and a Christmassy theme. Just one of the million or so free-to-use images from the British Library’s Flickr pages. A merry Christmas to all!
Following the release of one million free-to-use images from the British Library, extracted automatically from digitised copies of nineteenth century, there has been an astonishing reaction worldwide. Well over 50 million visits have been made top the British Library’s Flickr pages, and more than just visiting people have been identifying, tagging, blogging and sharing thoseRead More
A few months ago, the British Library launched the Mechanical Curator. This was a tool built out of the BL Labs project, which automatically extracted images from 65,000 or so out-of-copyright 19th century books which Microsoft had digitised for the Library backs in the days when it thought it might compete with Google in theRead More