Do you think these were early 'Photoshopped' photos?

[DDTJRAC]

Source: LoC

 

[koraks]

I sure think so - nice find!

 

[Pieter12]

Since when does Photoshop (a trademarked software program) mean retouched or altered?

 

[BrianShaw]

Since when does Photoshop (a trademarked software program) mean retouched or altered?

About the same time as when a noun became a verb.

 

[MattKing]

Historically, PhotoShop was aimed at handling images in the graphics industry, not the photography world per se.
It has become a photographic tool, but it didn't start out that way.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Using two or more shots for the same print goes back way earlier than that. Early landscape photographers would often dub in clouds from a different image, since those old blue-sensitive plates would overexpose the skies in the primary exposure.

Even Arthur Canon Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, was fooled by a composite photo made by some little school girls, convincing him that fairies truly existed.

 

[Pieter12]

Using two or more shots for the same print goes back way earlier than that. Early landscape photographers would often dub in clouds from a different image, since those old blue-sensitive plates would overexpose the skies in the primary exposure.

Even Arthur Canon Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, was fooled by a composite photo made by some little school girls, convincing him that fairies truly existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge​

Eadweard Muybridge was known in his day for his impressive collection of clouds that he would routinely insert in landscapes and panoramas, contact printed from huge plates.

 

[Pieter12]

Historically, PhotoShop was aimed at handling images in the graphics industry, not the photography world per se.
It has become a photographic tool, but it didn't start out that way.

Well, the retouching part of the graphics industry, and also as a painting program. Digital photography was in its infancy then, and before the more powerful versions of Photoshop most digital retouching was done on drum-scanned images in room-size retouching suites with major big-bucks equipment and software, usually by a traditionally-trained retoucher. I think the going rate was $500/hour at the time and then an LVT transparency needed to be made because for some reason most printers did not take the digital files directly.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Muybridge was a master. Anyone who thinks Ansel Adams was the pioneer of Yosemite photography and its greatest practitioner doesn't know a thing.

There's a famous manually stitched large-plate panorama of the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan and the great peaks along there taken by Vittrio Sella. In the middle distance is a string of climbers with the ice axes, roped together. Not until recently was it discovered that the original neg didn't had any climbers in it, and the neg which did was taken in the French Alps. It was so well done that nobody detected the ruse. But when they did, and measured things to scale, those climbers would have each needed to be 18 feet tall if their presence in the scene had been realistic.

 

[cliveh]

Muybridge was a master. Anyone who thinks Ansel Adams was the pioneer of Yosemite photography and its greatest practitioner doesn't know a thing.

Muybridge was also a murderer, he shot his wife's lover through the heart.

 

[Pieter12]

Muybridge was also a murderer, he shot his wife's lover through the heart.

And?

 

[DREW WILEY]

The most impressive print I ever saw of El Capitan in Yosemite was done by Muybridge, and had a blue plate completely blank sky, with El Cap lurching up pale white itself, barely gray - an impression of sheer scale, stunning simple, but quite hard to duplicate. I tried using a deep blue filter and pan film; but on the typical summer day in this century, there is simply too much campfire and forest fire smoke in the Valley to do it subtly. Back then, there was some. Yosemite Valley itself wasn't a wilderness. My babysitter, 92 at the time, had been the first white woman to ever enter Yosemite, back when she was a little girl.

Muybridge's greatest claim to fame was as a predecessor to movies. A couple of the great California silver mine "robber baron" bankers placed a bet on whether or not horses ever had all four feet off the ground when running. Having connections to those powerful types of men proved quite valuable when being tried for the murder of his wife, when he caught her doing something naughty after returning from a trip. But he himself had many affairs, with Indian women, when out photographing the frontier. That was perhaps the first successful "temporary insanity" murder trial defense.

The greatest of all landscape photographers was Carleton Watkins. His personal large plate albumen prints of Yosemite are the most impressive ever. But he also took lots and lots of dime a dozen stereo prints for the tourism trade (the railroads were his sponsor). We had a big pile of those in the attic, and as a child, I'd look at them using an original old red-velvet-lined leather Stereopticon.

 

[benderscameracorner]

The aeroplane composites remind me of similar work by Tasmanian photographer Herbert John 'HJ' King in the 1930s for an airshow here in northern Tasmania. He's perhaps more better known for his composite of the thylacine ('Tasmanian Tiger') looking over Cradle Mountain.

King was by definition an amateur photographer, whose image making served initially as a way of promoting the family's bicycle and motorcycle business, notably dragging his Indian Motorcycles to far-flung parts of the state. Free of the commercial constraints of being a professional photographer, he dabbled in everything... panoramic photography with the Kodak Cirkut, infrared, stereophotography, motion picture, the lot.

He became particularly enamoured with aerial photography in the late 1910s and would be commissioned to complete an aerial survey of Launceston in 1922 - the first city in Australia to be photographed in its entirety from the air. The entire composite consisted of 81 (or 65, depending on the source) glass plates taken with a custom rangefinder camera King designed and made himself. Quite the 'photoshop' job.

Libraries Tasmania - Aerial survey of the City of Launceston, 1922 [1277969]

The first aerial survey of Launceston

Taking the first aerial photograph of Launceston wasn’t an easy feat.In 1922 local photographer HJ King was commissioned by the City of Launceston to complete an aerial survey of the city.Before the work could begin, King needed to find both a pilot and an aircraft owner who...

www.qvmag.tas.gov.au

Map Viewer

 

[ic-racer]

Source: LoC

Those don't look like computer graphics (so called "Photoshop") images. They look like composites created with traditional darkroom tools.

 

[jvo]

Those don't look like computer graphics (so called "Photoshop") images. They look like composites created with traditional darkroom tools.

++++

 

[P Sanders]

Agree with ic-racer. The term 'photoshop' could be considered digital conversion and manipulation. Originally there was Scitex and Paintbox where the images were converted digitally onto reel magnetic tape, before Adobe.

Photo composite required stripping and assembling acetates and then combining onto a single film or print. A famous photographer that comes to mind is Jerry Uelsmann.

 

[Arthurwg]

Agree with ic-racer. The term 'photoshop' could be considered digital conversion and manipulation. Originally there was Scitex and Paintbox where the images were converted digitally onto reel magnetic tape, before Adobe.

Yes, but there were precursors to Photoshop with much the same goals. Among them I'm reminder of Soviet photo- manipulations back in the day, and Gustav Le Gray's famous use of two negatives to add clouds to his seascapes.

 

[Pieter12]

Yes, but there were precursors to Photoshop with much the same goals. Among them I'm reminder of Soviet photo- manipulations back in the day, and Gustav Le Gray's famous use of two negatives to add clouds to his seascapes.

The precursors were either primitive or astronomically priced and required expensive setups. The example of the OP is quite rudimentary, most likely was pasted-up, hand-retouched and rephotographed. No computers involved.

 

[koraks]

The precursors were either primitive or astronomically priced and required expensive setups. The example of the OP is quite rudimentary, most likely was pasted-up, hand-retouched and rephotographed. No computers involved.

I think the 'precursors' @Arthurwg refers to aren't computer-based, either. The examples he mention predate the computer age by many decades. E.g. the Soviet photo manipulations rise to prominence at about the moment Stalin made his claim to power, so we're talking 1920s-1930s. This was, like you said, pasted-up, hand-retouched, etc.

Also, isn't the whole discussion a little silly? To me it's obvious the mention of 'Photoshop' by @DDTJRAC shouldn't be taken literally and we're talking about photomontage instead, without the aid of digital tools.

 

[Pieter12]

I think the 'precursors' @Arthurwg refers to aren't computer-based, either. The examples he mention predate the computer age by many decades. E.g. the Soviet photo manipulations rise to prominence at about the moment Stalin made his claim to power, so we're talking 1920s-1930s. This was, like you said, pasted-up, hand-retouched, etc.

Also, isn't the whole discussion a little silly? To me it's obvious the mention of 'Photoshop' by @DDTJRAC shouldn't be taken literally and we're talking about photomontage instead, without the aid of digital tools.

It is definitely silly and pretty much obvious and irrelevant.

 

[Petrochemist]

Also, isn't the whole discussion a little silly? To me it's obvious the mention of 'Photoshop' by @DDTJRAC shouldn't be taken literally and we're talking about photomontage instead, without the aid of digital tools.

Given Photoshopped was used in quotes, it's quite clearly referring to the darkroom compositing process, rather than the software..
Lots of photographers had fun making multiple exposures & printing compostites long before computers were around.
I've seen one print of a woman in a glass that my grandfather made around the time of the first world war. Shame I don't have it...

 

[Pieter12]

It seems absurd that a forum mostly dedicated to analog techniques and people don't know the term "retouched" or "composited" and have to use a term reserved for digital imaging.

 

[awty]

Very cool picture, wonder who won, suspect it wasn't the blimp, looks like it had to go wide.

 

[Arthurwg]

It is definitely silly and pretty much obvious and irrelevant.

I agree.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Complex photo-comps were routine to the advertising industry for almost a hundred years before computerized methods arrived. It was an entire industry. That's why PS borrowed known standard graphics terms for its own primary apps.

As a child, my mother made scrapbooks out of old as well as contemporaneous magazine and calendar advertisements, many from the latter half of the 19thC. Every psychological advertising ploy used today was used back then, just in a different cultural framework. Color was added in during the pre-press phase, rather than on color film itself.