The mystery of the "same sky" postcards
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- An obsessive collector noticed something strange in his 11,000 postcards.
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James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old age homes, ugly restaurants, and 1960s advertising are neatly organized in boxes in his Canadian home. But James started to notice that some of his postcards - dozens, in fact - appeared to have the exact same sky. Looking even closer, he noticed that the same-sky postcards were all made by one publisher: Dexter Press out of West Nyack, New York.
Dexter Press was once one of the largest publishers of "chrome-era postcards," - postcards made from color photographs that became popular in the 1940s. By the time James started collecting in the 1980s, "chrome cards" were mostly overlooked by collectors, and could be bought for cheap in flea markets. It wasn't until he looked through a lot of these cards that he noticed the same sky repeating itself.
Darkroom producer Coleman Lowndes took a trip to British Columbia, Canada, to see James's collection for himself - and to help solve the mystery of these identical skies. To James though, the mystery doesn't really matter. The reason the skies look the same is less important to him than the unusual visual effect it produces when all these skies come together.
Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn't show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes here: • Vox Darkroom
Explore James’s full postcard collection online here: www.flickr.com...
Bill Burton’s online magazine Postcard History: postcardhistor...
Read up on Dexter Press and all things postcard on MetroPostcard: www.metropostca...
Original Dexter Press postcards at Queen of Chrome’s eBay store: www.ebay.com/s...
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Get lost in the onlookers, ugly restaurants, caves, and, of course, same sky postcards in James’s incredible full online collection by clicking this link, SwellMap on Flickr 👇
www.flickr.com/photos/94207108@N02/albums
Have fun! -Coleman
Big chungus
The mystery aspect of this story is lame if you're a photographer, as I am, because you'd already know why the sky is the same in all those photos. People have been replacing skies for decades when it's not very interesting in the original photo. I've never done it because it feels like cheating if it's supposed to represent a moment in time. But that's not the purpose of postcards. The story is still interesting to me because James Brouwer's collection is amazing and because the story ends with an appreciation for them beyond the so-called mystery.
we need atlas
we need atlas
My
As someone who makes stock photos, it was immediately obvious why all those postcards had the same sky. The original sky was boring, and the replacement sky made the image much more interesting to look at.
Yea, it really doesn’t seem mysterious at all
people in the landscape photos always wore red clothing to stand out.
Not just that. Even if the original sky wasn't boring, it was more work setting up the right filters for just the sky so you could develop it easily with high dynamic range. Getting high contrast in both highlights and shadows can be quite tricky in landscape photography. And with no way to quickly see the results on site... postcard photographers and editors chose to focus on the subjects instead... knowing they would use the stock sky after all...
exactly, sky replacement is also one of the most common thing to do in Photo retouch.
Especialy outdoor wedding photography
That doesn't explain why the replacement sky was used. Or a select few replacements used.
I will be here for Darkroom as long as you keep making it Coleman. Amazing work as always!!!
Sure
Can you make a documentary on Nigeria new coming democracy
how are you mr harris
bring back vox borders.
@@wolfgangbr1576 He is planning to bring back borders but its going to have a different name called Uncharted and for his first video will be about Cyprus
I say this with the utmost respect: for such an obsessive collector he seems surprisingly sane and fun!
he's Canadian!
Did he sound a bit like John Lithgow to you? Please say it wasn't just me....
@@dontbefatuousjeffrey2494 I only know him dubbed, sorry
Many obsessive collectors in the Nordic region are sane as well.
mUsT bE a CoNsPiRaCy
...surprisingly sane?
Obsessive?
Oh guck off. Why should people care about your specific passing of judgmenet on them or whatever prejudices you have?
“Even though we live in different place, we live under the same sky”
Literally..
✋😔🤚
is that the colombia borders reference? an excellent vox video as well :~)
These are basically my song lyrics 😆 JHVH - “Under the Same Sky”
Its still the same sky well unless all of a sudden it changes red
Imagine vox just messages you on the internet and invites you to just do a whole video on your niche hobby lol
Someone wants to be on Vox
well don't *have* to
This is what we thought the internet and WWW would be when it first started. It's what it was for a little while. But once the corporations and the hate groups got on board, things took a turn. Hopefully we can adapt our culture to deal with it.
sounds like a dream
6:10 "33"
From a printing perspective it would be a way to control the ink going down on the press if all the skies were a similar color it would use the same amount of ink in certain places. This is from a color separation standpoint. It would also provide even coverage
That makes sense.
Makes sense. Imagine they want to do a color calibration but the printer operator never went to the place before, so the only thing he can compare and check is by looking for some consistent objects, such as red shirt and blue sky.
From a film photography perspective, sometimes correct exposure for a subject, like a building on a street, can result in the sky to be overexposed, if you aimed for the correct exposure for the sky, then this can result in the subject to be underexposed. This is actually very common even today and its simply because the sky typically the brightest part of the overall scene.
By having a correctly exposed stock image of a sky background, photos that had the exposure set to capture the subject rather than the sky in the background and resulted in perhaps less aesthically pleasing sky could quickly have the best of both worlds.
Early color film had very low dynamic range. Even a skilled photographer wouldn't have been able to capture details in the sky without underexposing the actual subject, hence the sky would be completely blown out, so that the ground is visible. Plus, many people who wanted a tacky postcard printed may not have gone for the best photographer.
This is the answer. (Elliot posted it first)
If there is an additional technical problem with printing large white areas, that adds to the motivation to put in the work and replace the sky.
Yes there are a lot of limitations with photography. But I am talking about things from a printing perspective printing on paper using presses. What you want to do is have universal even ink coverage. Lighter shades of color in general on print runs is hard to maintain. So from a printing perspective it makes good sense for the skies to be more uniform.
I love how excited James is about talking about his postcards.
My first thought when seeing this video's title was "the sky was boring and they replaced it with a stock" because it's a staple of photo retouching. When I was working in marketing, I had to replace skies just about any time we photographed a client's business. You just don't have the luxury to wait for optimal visual weather. Now that I teach graphic design and illustration, the very first composite exercise I give to students is a sky replacement because they're simple, easy and about as common as you can get.
Edit: Reading this back it sounded annoyed, so I should add that I enjoyed the video, as I always do, I'm just a little amused that your graphics department probably could've answered the question without a flight to British Columbia.
Most of the retouching I did was removing dust spots, and taking out errant hairs in people, along with other minor blemishes. Yes also a lot of background removal as well, though luckily most of the model shooting was done with a plain unbleached canvas sheet backdrop, so as to keep white highlights down. Much easier to remove that than a brilliant white background.
I think the point was that it was remarkable someone collected the miscellaneous stamps and arranged them to bring out the fact they are stock images. We would have never even know about it like the person on the phone said " who was going to do that"...
Plus the idea that arranging them together like that made them stand out more and gain greater significance than any single postcard in itself.
You were on point, it was and still is quite common... but most people still don't see it which means it was a good job.
I'll add to this and say that getting a well lit image is easier on a moderately cloudy day, because the clouds diffuse the sun's light, but a mostly cloudless sky is prettier.
They'd still take all the photos they're paid to, but the ones with a replaced sky may often just look better, in part because of the initial lighting conditions.
Who doesn’t want to go to BC though? It certainly lives up the the “beautiful” in its motto
"There's no way of knowing why they left some skies untouched." Cut to a shot of a postcard with a nice blue sky that doesn't need retouching - that's your answer right there! As someone who's done sky replacement for property listings, if it's an overcast day, you replace it - if it's nice and sunny, no need to bother.
Yep
In Norway there was a pretty big story some time ago about a realtor who replaced the sky in a listing photo from foggy to sunny. What he didn’t realize was that there was a huge mountain behind the house he was selling, and that mountain mysteriously disappeared in the listing
Graphic designer over here like uh yeah, yep, this. It's that simple lol.
Me too haha
this kinda makes me want to collect postcards now
You haven’t even seen the video, you commented this a few seconds after the video was posted.
I definitely had that thought. ... ... It's so nice to be able to share that kind of feeling. ... ... It's kind of like the one I get for little local museums, though I know not everybody gets that. Oh, and that reminds me that I got a bit of a rush in the segment with the wax museums. So transporting; so cool.
I love collecting postcards! When Im not sending them to people, I buy them on trips and write on them what I remember most about my adventure!
@@emilal Because she has style. The first time they showed a set of these postcards I was struck by the repetitive beauty of random motives as well.
People collect all sorts of weird things, but I do see myself collecting this
I have a bit of a different idea here. Given that the source images were likely taken on slide film (kodachrome) we have to consider the dynamic range of the film. Kodachrome has a dynamic range of around 7 stops which is not a lot. Consequently, it's very difficult to have a well exposed foreground as well as sky in a picture. Especially if the sky is overcast. If your main subject is well exposed, the sky will almost always be completely blown out.
Funnily enough, a completely blown out sky in a slide will be completely transparent. This could make it very easy to slide in a stock photo sky behind it as a replacement.
Could it be that these beautiful skies were used whenever it was necessary to replace a blown out sky in a picture?
Excellent point. That would explain why the sky looks so natural. Doing a literal cut-and-paste would leave traces.
Exactly what I thought. As a former darkroom printer and photographer (on film) it was the first thing that came to mind. I myself have a collection of blue skies to use in photos with overexposed skies that I use to this day.
My first thought too. I noticed that many of these shots that were taken in sunshine have the sun to one side but almost in front of the camera, or almost directly overhead; there's no chance of getting a sky that's well exposed all over. I expect that many of these shots of businesses were taken by the nearest available relative with a "good camera", often at lunch time.
This is the correct answer. I used to run a darkroom, and this is exactly what happens. I'm honestly shocked Vox missed it.
Yup, physics is the reason.
Mad props to the artists who did those matte jobs and tone matching so perfectly in the pre-Photoshop era.
It was being done for newspapers, everything. Just think of air brush artists using photos to make movie posters. Top skills.
Ppl have been “photoshopping “ since 1850s even famous historical photographs and not just wrinkle removal
What a cool nugget of history, his collection is pretty cool too.
You should have ended the story with a picture of you and James with the same sky behind you. :)
and a red shirt
Chrome-Era postcards will always remind me of my grandparents. I would get one everytime they traveled to a new place.
I loved this visit into something so simple, but meaningful. ❤ Thank you.
It's poetic in a way, to have such a subtle similarity linking all these different places together
I believe the "onlooker" landscape style was common among landscape photographers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. My grandmother was an award winning landscape photographer in that era and most of her photos had onlookers (often dressed in bright colors that clashed with the landscape). She spent decades teaching others to take landscape photos and led photo travel groups to places like Hawaii or Vermont in the Fall. I'm sure she taught others to add onlookers to their works. It doesn't surprise me that postcards from that era used that same composition style. Great video! Cheers.
What was her name? Would love to check out her photos!
When's the last time you sent a postcard? Let us know in the comments below 📬
15
I just watched a whole video about post cards
last week, I am a postcrosser.
We think of stock photos being a digital-era phenomena, so it's really cool to see the same thought process clearly happened back in the analogue processes of the mid-20th century
Even before that
When you replace a sky, having a sky that you know the values of for printing is really very helpful.
The most fascinating thing for me is confirmation that there is ALWAYS someone who will collect something and there will ALWAYS be a magazine for them 😃
From a film photography perspective, sometimes correct exposure for a subject, like a building on a street, can result in the sky to be overexposed, if you aimed for the correct exposure for the sky, then this can result in the subject to be underexposed. This is actually very common even today and its simply because the sky typically the brightest part of the overall scene.
By having a correctly exposed stock image of a sky background, photos that had the exposure set to capture the subject rather than the sky in the background and resulted in perhaps less aesthically pleasing sky could quickly have the best of both worlds.
Slide film especially. Kodachrome and Ektachrome have limited dynamic range, especially compared to Color Negative film
Seeing Mr PG makes me happy ❤️
As a fellow northerner, I feel the same :)
loved the storytelling style here. as a postcard collector myself, it was great to learn that there can be such an interesting tale behind even such mundane-looking postcards.
We live in a mundane world.
As a production artist, this makes my little "use templates and presets for sanity and profit" heart happy.
As a nature/suburbia photographer and professional retoucher, sky replacement is actually something I do a lot. When the focus is on the foreground and your angles, and subject is sometimes something you can control, the sky rarely is also that. I actually make an effort to use different skies (some stock, some I've taken myself) and not repeat so often, but I actually loved the same pattern repeating like James was describing. Beautiful, nostalgic collection he has there.
I love how he found the beauty in that they all had the same sky, giving more attention to details below.
Always a silver lining.
...I see what you did there.
"There's no way to know for sure why they replaced some skies and seemingly left others untouched."
We can't know 100%, but I suspect that if you had the time to find other photographs of the same locations, you would find power lines, phone lines, billboards, marquee signs, trees, and other buildings that didn't seem to suit a postcard. That is to say that same skies were likely replacements not just for original skies, but for whatever they wanted removed from the not-yet-postcardified scenes.
Yes, I did make my own postcards using a Selphy printer, and did not want to do too much retouching, so used careful placement and cropping, to get the best image I could, avoiding the uglier parts of the background. Did choose a nice afternoon though, to get the reddish sky in the late afternoon, with the clouds highlighted.
I was thinking that the "onlookers" have also been retouched to appear to be all wearing red, even if they likely were not in reality. Maybe they just painted a translucent red over the original, or cut out some material like cellophane?
Also in the other photos of otherwise relatively bland and boring buildings. You see one red eycatcher almost every time, be it a sign, a billboard, a parked car or something else. I really digged it now after over 30 years, why my photos always look so bland, regardless how spectacular the scenery is or how much I take care to get the right section and angle 🤯.
Maybe the models they used were encouraged to wear red
Some of them looked retouched, while others looked like they were genuinely wearing red.
They were definitely meant as eyecatchers, as red is the best way to contrast the onlookers from the rest of the scene.
"Onlookers" post cards give me Tom Scott vibe.
@@archierm “I am on a postcard with a Stock sky” -Tom Scott, probably
This was beautiful. This man’s passion for these things seems so wholesome.
I am SO glad I watched this. I still have the postcards I collected from when I was younger(1990's), this video made me bring them back out. It turns out that I also have some of the cloud photos. Of course, all by Dexter. Weirdly, I never noticed it before.
genuinely the best piece of fun, lighthearted journalism I've seen in AGES! 10/10 to anyone involved in making this
So cool to see a postcard from my hometown of Prince George, British Columbia in the collection. Mr. PG is a classic!
Plot Twist: Dexter was a memer running a meme machine.
Kmsl
Plot twist: Dexter kills people in his free time.
This is THE best series in UA-cam! Respect to all the great research and interviews that are done.
Fascinating how so much around us is mostly out of focus for us. Focusing just a little bit into our surroundings could open a pandora's box.
How delightful to learn about a tiny facet of the world like this. Just wonderful, thank you.
As a kid, I wondered why some postcards looked like the buildings or other objects were cut out and pasted onto the sky. I also noticed the general recurring blue sky theme, but not that it was truly the same sky. And in some cases, it feels like a coloring mismatch. I ended up taking it to be some kind of color manipulation designed to make the images "pop", and to make the buildings/land stand out. I never considered that they were actually cutting out the objects and pasting them onto stock sky images.
This channel keeps on answering questions I did not ask and I love it.
Vox makes me interested in things I would never be interested in.
That’s their goal, just make sure not to waste to much of your time friend. Don’t forget to write your own documentary.
Fascinating. As a postcard collector in hiatus this video could get me fired up again. Loved the topical nature of his collecting, people standing in views, same sky, etc. And he stays with the relatively inexpensive chrome postcard as compared to the earlier formats. Nice.
Now this is the kind of content I like. Awesome video. James seems really passionate about his collection and it is very inspiring
James seems like such a fun and nice guy! The type of guy you would wanna go to a museum with!
What an amazing collection, and I'm so glad he's scanned them and put them online- this is a huge preservation effort, and there's probably a lot of American history hidden in this collection! Such a cool video.
This is heartwarming! Really love it, great job Coleman!
This is the best series on the internet.
This is content not found on most other channels and it’s largely why I keep coming back. It’s original, it’s interesting, it’s obscure, it’s whimsical... 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Man, you definitely changed my mind about buying postcards the next time I travel.
Thanks for doing this video, it brought back so many memories. You see, Thomas Dexter was my grandfather and I grew up running around Dexter Press with all the printing presses, the art department, the bindery where the postcards were cut to individual cards from stacks of big sheets of printed postcards that were ultimately shipped to customers. My mother, as a child, "helped" my grandfather develop his color separation process that enabled him to print natural color (although they enhanced the red color for visual appeal) postcards and the process that led to the gang printing of the postcards on large sheets of paper. My grandfather was a great guy. Dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the Army, but he had a printing class in high school shop that he really enjoyed. Oh, there are so many good stories, like being 16 and the Army knowing it so they kept him in New York City as a driver for officers, including the WW 1 ace pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, with a female companion or two. After the war he started a weekly newspaper business. One side story to the newspaper business was the time he got a call from a sports writer at one of the large newspapers in NYC to see if my grandfather would let Babe Ruth deer hunt on his property in the mountains north of NYC. My mother got a signed baseball out of that hunting trip. He began playing with Kodachrome chemistry and even corresponded with George Eastman from Kodak. My mother talks about making color separations using the bathtub as a way to avoid spilling the chemicals in their home. Once he perfected his technique he began to print the natural color postcards. He told me that existing postcards did not have a lot, if any, color and were selling for a penny each. The first time his salesperson put a small postcard display on the counter of a drug store people were reaching over the salesperson's shoulder to see them. He was able to have the natural color postcards sell for a nickel, quite the premium. The business took off from there.
And yes, the same sky was used on multiple postcards because the sky was not always a clear blue with nice white clouds when the picture was taken. The art department, which consisted of about 10 people, would crop the sky into the picture to make a more visually pleasing postcard.
Rob, I worked briefly as a mechanical artist for Auggie Schnitzler in the art dept. at Dexter Press. It was a summer job in 1965 before I went off to college. I was never asked to replace a sky, but it certainly was a common task in all design studios, ad agencies and in-house art departments.
01:48 imagine if she just rick rolled him, thats what i would do to be honest
He was rick rolled. It was just edited out.
Imagining this made me laugh, thanks 🤣
I legit couldnt stop skiling all throughout the video. This is so fascinating!
Why is this so interesting? Seriously, I can't understand why I enjoyed this so much.
This was so friggin' interesting! I did NOT anticipate sitting here, scratching my head, completely submerged in a subject most people would describe as "arbitrary"; Buuut here I am, completely and totally fascinated of this story about the sky in old postcards. I LOVE IT!
Thank you thank you thank you! As a photographer and photography lover this is priceless!!!
transports me back to every postcard rack, in every Stuckey's, we browsed on endless road trips in the '60s--oblivious that we were mailing all those same skies, brilliant! great piece, thanks.
When I was in media class in high school, we made a post card. We had to get rid of grayscale in the sky and replace it with clouds. I feel like this is just pre-photoshop photoshop.
What we should be talking about is James’ Booker Little LP. This guy has great taste in music.
To expand on a number of other commenters pointing out that the swap may be because the original photo's sky was just boring I think it's also worth noting the color reversal, or slide film like kodachrome is very unforgiving in its exposure latitude compared to negative film. Original images may have been shot to properly expose foregrounds but left the bright sky blown out and over exposed. If the perfect sky was hard to get an image of they may have just expected to correct it in post.
A most interesting documentary. A fascinating discovery in what many would consider a mundane subject. Good work.
This made me smile throughout
Love this kind of journalism :)
Wow---that was fascinating. I have a bunch of old postcards from when I was a young child--I'll have to go back and check out the skies.
Yeah this was freaky. I'd have never noticed they all had the same sky. It's like Truman Show stuff.
How amazing. I am from Prince George BC, and our city Mascot is the wooden statue of Mr. PG featured so many times in this vid!
What's most interesting to me is how they were able to use stock imagery before Photoshop! It's kind of mind blowing that they could mask out and replace part of the image and colour-match it so well.
This really hits me. Somehow the little things you do, photos you took may seems uninteresting to others & only interesting to you. But somewhere in the future, there are people who might think that the things you do are fasinating
I love people who have an astute eye for patterns and likeness. I do the same thing with screaming sounds on movies and commercials.
I collect postcards from every place I visit. I love this-- the collection of skies all lined up. Personally in the era of digital editing I'm a huge fan of the worst the field has to offer, but it's incredible to see we've been doing baffling edits on mass-produced postcards ever since we could.
It is really great to think that any interesting things you make, either by mistake or intention, will have a fair chance of being discovered by somebody else, soon or later.
It just looks beautifully aesthetic. That's all I guess. Really gives old time vibe.
Love this series!
This was such an interesting program. I too love post cards. What a great hobby😳
I am so glad I am a subscriber! Awesome story!
Really cool observation. It's like an unintentional, synthetic version of "Vemodalen" from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
I love how almost all those postcards look. They make me feel safe and relaxed. Might start collecting vintage postcards now :D
This is so unbelievably fascinating! Thank you, Vox!
Tapped on it by mistake but eventually watched he whole thing. Really intriguing
These Dexter pictures show us a great example of a bygone era.
Very interesting and fun video! From a photography perspective, I’d think it might also have something to do with the exposure. Pictures taken in an overcast day are normally more evenly exposed, with softer shadows. So it would make sense to take the picture of said location in an overcast day, and then replace the sky to make the scene look “perfect”!
The more often you see something the more you like it, like the Mona Lisa, the same sky becomes recognizable and comforting
Another video I'd never find interesting but watched to the end.
Amazing story. Just awesome! Wow.
This is interesting. I love videos and stories like this.
What an amazing collection
Went to an exhibition at the Barbican London of 'water towers' mostly by Becher, which led me onto Soviet Bus stops from the constructivist period, still find myself taking images of moody bus stops and square on industrial landscapes, especially Steel Works (ref ; Flicker, Marmite Lens).
Going to look at junk/second hand/charity shops for cards...great video! Though the 'Giant Steps' video is still my all time favorite, genius. Well done all.....
This was really good. What an interesting story.
absolutely love these kinds of videos
Now this is something I never expected
James is my hero.
Cool story, always a joy to watch
Fun video! Lots of British Columbiana represented in those photos with Mr. PG standing out the most of course. I had to chuckle at that bland McLeod Lake postcard as one of the greatest photos I’ve ever taken in my life was from that very spot!!!
This is absolutely lovely
"They are the same sky because they offered retouching services and used stock images of better looking skys when requested."
"We may never know why some skys were replaced and others were left untouched."
Some customers paid for the service and others didn't.
TRULY know, grow some ears, speculation isn't TRULY knowing
Beautiful, BC.
As a creative designer, this is a great story, Dexter postcard is ahead of it's time.
A video I never knew I needed
The postcards become a genre with this ref to typology. I wish we'd have postcard exhibitions too. Brilliant work guys!
I live in Victoria too! James, if you see this - I would love to see your post cards in person!!
I looooove postcards!! I've been collecting postcards featuring Oregon, especially Portland! However, I have postcards featuring tons of different places. I really love used postcards with interesting and/or funny messages on the back!
would love to see all this in a gallery exhibition!