Panorama Scanning - Elaine Patton, 6/27/2013

Images scanned today:

• MSS0100-1300 - 1323
• MSS0100-1275 - 1299

 And that's the end of the Schlueter trays! At least, the stack I've been pulling from. Lots of pictures of fig orchards in this bunch, but most amusing to me was the ad for Merit Bread toast on all the trucks in this fleet:

"Make toast your breakfast food"
Texas Bread Co.

Panorama Scanning - Elaine Patton, 6/20/2013

Items scanned today:

• MSS0100-1071 - 1075 + a random, unnumbered Litterst panorama (piece of paper in the tray suggests that it should have contained 1050-1075)
• MSS0100-1126 - 1150
• MSS0100-1200 - 1224
• MSS0100-1325 - 1346

Saving to the internal hard drive rather than straight to the external seems to have neutralized the weird file corruption of last week. A couple of pictures were of uncertain identifier; these got labeled "### possibly" (as a question mark can't go in the file name).

Panorama Scanning - Elaine Patton, 6/13/2013

Photos scanned: MSS0100-1151 - 1174, MSS0100-1175 - 1199, and MSS0100-1100 - 1125 (give or take).

For some reason at least a couple of the images didn't scan or write to the hard drive properly (trying to open them produced an error message about how the TIFF couldn't be parsed or something thereabouts). I rescanned the ones I noticed, but I didn't open all of them, so there's a possible future issue. The second tray also had a few duplicate numbers, marked by a (2) in the file names (and distinct from the extra-wide panorama that's labeled (pt 1) and (pt 2) in the file names).

Schlueter Panoramic Photographs

Today I scanned panoramic photo prints done by photographer Frank J. Schlueter, MSS0100-1076 through -109_ and MSS0100-1225 through -1274, give or take. I think the biggest difficulty was getting the long wooden trays back and forth between the archives and the digitization lab! I noticed that glossy photos with a lot of black/dark areas tended to gain a few thin streaks of color across the image, but that will be cleaned up later. A couple of the more sepia-toned images seemed to confuse the scanner's auto-cropping ability, as well. A few photos had crumbling edges or cracks, but thankfully, everything passed through the scanner just fine.

The third tray, containing photos from an apparently out-of-place MSS0223, was a little perplexing. It turned out to be mostly negatives (many of which are in poor condition, I'm sad to say), which was actually good for me, since a lot of the labeling was...well, a lot of labeling. I.e. there was the item number (MSS-etc), usually, plus some other serial number and sometimes two sets of other numbers (e.g. 15, 16, 50).

By the by, gas was 13 cents in 1925:

Favorite image, though, was MSS0100-1096. It has all these little splotchy artifacts that end of looking like stars in an impressionist painting, lending a sort of dreamy air to a rather straightforward industrial/rural setting: