Tag: photos

I've just finished a big push to add all of Fred Nietz' photos to the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection. If you remember, Fred posted a bunch of old photos to Flickr a couple of months ago, and I immediately started adding them to the site. All his photos can be seen on Flickr here. He had some great pictures of Carson City, some from the 30s 40s and 50s, but many of them from the 1980s, showing a side of town that is long gone, but that many of us can remember from fairly recent memory. It's fascinating to look through all these pictures, and to see that in just the course of 25 years most of the businesses lining Carson Street have changed. There are some constants, to be sure, but a lot of cases where the building has stayed the same, but the tenants are completely different.

So it took me two months, but I finally posted every one of Fred's photos to the WNHPC. It took a lot longer than it should because there were a lot of starts and stops along the way, and I just don't get to work on the site as much as I'd like to. But I really wanted to finish and get these pictures out there, so now it's done. Now I have to move on to all the other photo collections that are sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, waiting to go online. This is a huge project I've buried myself under; it seems like it's going to go on forever!

Anyway, here are some of the new additions. You can see them all at this link.

This was also cross-posted to the WNHPC blog.

Have you been adding your photos to the Around Carson Photo Pool at Flickr? Here are some of the best pictures from the last few weeks.

Join in and add your pictures today!

Have you been adding your photos to the Around Carson Photo Pool at Flickr? Here are some of the best pictures from the last few weeks.

Join in and add your pictures today!

Fred Nietz has delivered unto us a mother lode. Friday he opened an account on Flickr, and immediately dumped into it 57 of the most fantastic high-res historic photographs of Carson City. A few of the pictures are from the mid 20th century, but the great bulk of them are from the 1980s, and they depict a town that is familiar, but also definitely different from what we know today. There are pictures here of the St. Charles Hotel before it was renovated in the early 1990s, photos of downtown restaurants and businesses that have gone and been forgotten, the legislature before its facelift, and pictures of a few things that have been wiped out and replaced with something new. I call this kind of stuff "near history", because much of this is in the recent memory of many long-time residents of town, and you've probably eaten at the restaurants or been to the bars seen here. But for newcomers, or for younger readers, these pictures are as distant as a photo of a horse and carriage from the 1800s. So it's history for some, nostalgia for others, and an important piece of the story of Carson City for all of us.

It's all fantastic stuff, and I am taking much of it to add it to the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection and write descriptive captions of exactly what can be seen and what has changed about each of the pictures. It's a big job, but it's fun to do because the resolution on the pictures is so high, and there are so many little details and signs that can be made out to give clues about the way Carson City used to be.

So I suggest you go look at Fred's photos, and then also keep an eye open at the WNHPC as I add these pictures in. And Fred says he has more that he needs to go through and organize, so I can't wait until he's done that and gets more pictures up on Flickr.

Have you been adding your photos to the Around Carson Photo Pool at Flickr? Here are some of the best pictures from the last few weeks.

Join in and add your pictures today!

I found this pretty fantastic picture of sunset over the Carson Valley on Flickr.

And remember, if you're a Flickr member who lives in the area, there is an Around Carson photo pool that's open for anyone to add pictures to.

I want to point to this post by No Safe Place, and this photo, taken from "C" Hill before there was a "C" - sometime in the 1870s.

Carson City looked so tiny back then, and there were so few trees that the big buildings had no problem sticking out. From the left, you can easily see the US Mint, the Central School, the First Methodist Church, and the Capitol Building. The rest of the valley is just kind of a sagebrush wasteland fading off into the hazy mountains.

If you want to see what the view looks like today, you've got to click on the link.

Why are museums and historical societies so stingy with their photo collections? This is something I've always wondered. You've got an organization that's been created for the public good, like a museum, and they have this fantastic resource, like a collection of historic photos, that could easily be put on the web to enrich the community, but instead they hold onto it. They control access, they charge fees, they keep everything hidden and away from public view, and they only let these pictures be seen as special "exhibitions" that run for a limited time. Then the photos go back into the dark where nobody can see them except for the chosen few. Why do they do this?

The latest thing to prompt this question is an RGJ article on an exhibition at the Nevada Historical Society featuring photos from the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad over the Sierra. Sounds like a great exhibit:

Along with dozens of historic photos that track the building of the Central Pacific from Sacramento, across Nevada and into Utah where it met the westbound-building of the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, the exhibit includes maps of suggested routes for the railroad, artwork, artifacts from work on the railway and newspaper stories of the era.

Now, except for the artifacts part of that, this entire exhibit sounds like it could easily be put online. Grow your audience from hundreds to thousands, or hundreds of thousands. Instead of having it "run through Dec. 14" because you have limited space in your exhibition hall, put it online where it can be permanent. But do they do this? No. It's like they deliberately want to limit the reach of this exhibit, to share it with as few people as possible. They want the control, they like being the keepers. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

And it's not just this one exhibit. Museums all across the country have huge collections of photos and artwork that they could put online. Some of them do a pretty good job. Just search Google for historic photo collection and you'll get five million hits. But if you go in close and study the results, you'll see that these are only partial collections. Like they'll have a few dozen images online, and if you're lucky some kind of catalog of the rest. Our local museum, the Nevada State Museum here in Carson City, has none of this. Neither does the Nevada State Library and Archives. The afore-mentioned Nevada Historical Society has a website so out-of-date that it doesn't even mention this new Central Pacific exhibit. The only ones doing it right locally are the University of Nevada and their growing number of "Digital Collections". Maybe the other museums and libraries in the area need to catch a clue from them.

Some of the resistance might come from the fact that these photo collections are a revenue stream for museums and other organizations right now, and they don't want to cut that off. That's valid, but short-sighted. Are these collections being maintained for the good of the public, or as a way to raise money for the museum? And which of those two options is better for society? You can still charge for prints, anyway.

More resistance might come from them thinking the costs of putting the pictures online is too high. And that comes from not understanding the web. Most of the organizations I've found online that "get it" are using software called ContentDM, which from what I can tell looks like a very good CMS for publishing photos. The software isn't free, but I can't imagine it breaking a museum's budget. And if you don't want to shell out for a professional solution, find some volunteer or staff member that knows PHP and get them to write the thing. Or bring someone from the community that has the skills onto the project as a consultant. Photo galleries are not hard things to program; I've done it myself, so you know it's not difficult. And as far as hosting? Web hosting is cheap and getting cheaper every day. Maybe there are control freaks in the State IT department that balk at you running PHP or using outside hosting? Tell them to stuff it and remind them that you're their boss, not the other way around. Or even use Flickr and poach off of Yahoo!'s generosity.

The obstacles are there, but they're not insurmountable. More and more stuff is moving onto the web, the entire of human experience that can be transmitted digitally, text pictures and video, is moving onto the web. These museums, libraries, and historical societies need to get with it and realize that the transformation is happening. People don't want to have to visit the museum in order to visit the museum, you know? If they want to do it from home, if they want to do it from their office or from a coffee shop or from a hotel when they're on vacation, let them do it!

This is part of the motivation behind me wanting to build my own historical photo collection of Carson City and the surrounding areas, as a workaround for the state agencies that are dragging their feet. Some anonymous person out there has been great at submitting pictures to the Around Carson Photo Database, but one day soon I hope to start on a separate collection, a special site just for historic pictures, and dump in all the pictures I've gathered from all my different sources, and let you dump any pictures you might have, and maybe we can show them how to do it right and spur them to get off their butts to do it even better.

That's how the grassroots works. One blade at a time.

Someone's been awesomely posting old black and white historic photos of Carson City to the photo database this week. This is great stuff. I've seen most of these, but I haven't put any of them up online myself yet. And there's even a few in there that are new to me.

If you get some time, go over to the Photos page and check them out. This just spurs me on even more to get working on the Online Historic Photo Archive I've been wanting to build, where I would just take every old picture I've ever found of the area and dump them all online. It's something I really want to do, but the amount of work it would take to get there is daunting. Plus real life keeps getting in the way, Plus I've been in a massive creative slump lately (like you haven't noticed), so it's tough to take on a project this big. But I've found some really awesome V&T photos in the library, and that's wanted me to start up working on the Then And Now articles again, and now this anonymous person is doing some of the work for me, and it seems like maybe all the signs are there and I just need to get busy and get it done.

Never underestimate my capacity for procrastination, though. I've been too busy taking pictures of cows.

Looks like my little rant yesterday did the trick. We got about four inches of snow dumped on us last night. Of course it’s warm today and a lot of it will be gone by the afternoon, but that’s okay because nobody likes driving on snowy roads anyway. At least we got our one (relatively) big storm, so I’m satisfied.

I’ve put up many more photos at Flickr, so go check them out.