"Do-it-yourself" vintage wagon photos.

Dear "mature" station wagon lovers,

I just saw the feature on this forum with station wagons in vintage photographs. Some months ago, I took a photo of my 1965 Buick Special wagon next to historic railroad depot in my area.



Digitally aging photographs has become a real fad these days. So I thought, why not give it a try! Since we've had this car since 1968, I have photos from all that far back and so I know what the photos should look like from back then. So I tried my hand at making a faded color slide of about 1965:



and a black and white photo of the same era:



I thought I would share these photos with everybody because it is another fun thing you can do with your classic wagon and it isn't as hard as it seems. The hardest part will probably be finding a way to photograph your car in a scene that doesn't include anything that is "give away" modern. Once you've got the source photograph, you can find dozens of digital photo aging tutorials online. Unless you have a very old wagon, you shouldn't take them too seriously. You goal is a photograph that looks about 1960 - not 1906! A much better guide is photographs of the period.

You can use a program like Photoshop or many of the lower cost "amateur alternatives. I used a Mac shareware program called GraphicConverter. Just about any program with some image manipulation filters will probably be potent enough to do what I've done. For the curious and those unafraid to try new things, here is how I went about it:

• Try reducing the contrast to create a slightly "hazy" effect. Modern cameras are much sharper than the home cameras of the 60s. To compensate, increase the brightness - especially on the faded slide. For black and white, leaving the image a little "dark" (apparently underexposed) "works" in the illusion.
• On the faded slide, reduce the color saturation. That's a quick way to make it appear faded and wash out the colors. I made almost random nudges in the color balance to make the colors appear a little "off."
• On both, I used the Sepia toning effect to shift colors (or greyscale) toward browns. It doesn't take much of this effect to create an illusion of an aged photo.
• The images need to be blurred slightly to remove the digital sharpness. I used Gaussian blur because I've had good luck with it, but your blurring "mileage" will vary.

The one thing I realized very quickly is that very tiny adjustments could have big effects, so go slow in making your modifications. By all means work on copies and if you get to a result that you find better - save a copy of that just in case you screw it up by further meddling. As already noted before, look at examples to calibrate your expectations. For example, you'll see that old slide is noticably more blurry than the black and while. That's because in my experience, early color images suffer more from age than black and white.

So there you are! Here is an interesting way to make retro-Postcards or perhaps an authentic-looking photo Christmas card. Another fun thing you can do with your classic wagon!!

Cheers, Edouard

 

Good advice!

I achieve similar pictures using my old Argus A2F

 

Good work, Edouard!

I took a look at your original pic - couldn't see anything that's a real giveaway......

Reminds me of something......
In 1996, the actor Tom Hanks (and others of course) filmed the movie, "That Thing You Do", about a fictional rock and roll band starting out in 1964. The movie was partly filmed in Orange, California, which is where I lived at the time. It was filmed in the original 'downtown' area of the city, which still has an old soda fountain/drug store, an Army/Navy Store, a Radio Shack, a bunch of antique stores, etc., so it kinda looks 'old' already. The film production company still had to do quite a bit of set decoration to make everything fit in with the period look. About the only location that didn't need much was Watson's Drug and Soda Fountain, which still to this day looks like something from the 50's inside.....

 

Indeed...


One can try the sepia tone and a little weathering too.

 

The vintage point and shoot cameras had rather soft lenses but the better cameras of that era had extremely good lenses that are competitive with a much of the current crop so the pics wouldn't necessarily have to be blurred. Some of the vintage medium format cameras are capable of stunning images.

mike

 

Nice work. I'll try it out myself when I get my wagon home. The one thing in your photo that gives it away though, is the blue "handicapped" parking space, but it doesn't show up in the B&W pic.

 

Thanks - missed the handicap space!

Dear Hoop, Krash, Jairus, Mike, Jim, and Wagon lovers everywhere

Thanks for the kind replies. Honestly, it was just a quickie experiment. Right now, my wagon is limited to about 35 mph, so it isn't practical to take the car to more suitable historic venues. To be perfectly honest, that railroad depot is right next to of all things a grocery store!!

Oops! You have a better eye for detail than me! I hadn't noticed that. Certainly would be easy to "paint" it over with various photo touch-up techniques. Certainly shows much our modern world has "creeped" into even a historical locale!

Thanks again!

Cheers, Edouard

 

Dear "mature" station wagon lovers,

Well, this leaves me out. But I am old! Thanks for the interesting post and photos.

 

Heres a few of my Vista in some "vintage" pictures. I have a couple applications on my iPhone that lets me play around with these effects.

 

This is great fun. I don't have a fancy camera phone with "Vintage photo" options. I took these pictures at different times a couple of summers ago. I downloaded them and then used photoshop. Not perfect as far as making sure they don't have stuff in them that is "too new" but fun none the less. I dig the ones with the faded color and the sepia affect. Thanks for sharing yours.

 

Nice examples!

Dear CatModelT, 77Vista, OrthmannJ, and Station Wagon lovers everywhere,

Thanks for sharing your own attempts at this!

I've been a little leery of photo aging software because it tends to be heavy-handed. However, your examples with Vista Cruiser look just fine.

I think aging photos for black and white is easier and more realistic because for most of us, black and white film was reasonably good by the time our wagons were built. So there is less tweaking needed to get a good effect.

If anyone else wants to try their hand at this - go for it!!

Cheers, Edouard

 

I don't have any wagon pics handy so I hope, Edouard, that you don't mind my playing with yours.

Anyone else remember those old original formula Ektachromes... They didn't hold up nearly as well as Kodachrome.

mike

 

We have BOXES of Ectachrome slides at home, and most are over 50 years old, some as old as 70. Put them in a projector, and the images are as clear and sharp as almost anything I've seen out of 'normal priced' modern camera. I will have to see if there are any photos of wagons in that mess!

 

What's your Ektachrome aging recipe?

Dear Mike, Mike, and Station Wagon lover,

What do ya' mean? . . . . don't you take pictures of your wagon almost every time you take it out?

Very interesting effect!! My family seems to have stuck to Kodachrome so I haven't seen old photos looking like that. By the time I was taking pictures the slide stability seems to have become reasonably good.

Can you tell us what tweaking you did?

Cheers, Edouard

 

What a cool thread, Edouard! Some very choice photos as well.

A few months back, I snapped some photos of my green '61 Plymouth in front of a very well kept older house to make some "new" vintage photos.

My computer skills aren't very good, but I was happy with the result.

Here's the original:


Then, with bit of work:


Here she is in front of a different house:

The photo above was tricky, as my wagon is blocking a satellite dish!
Pete