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Aug 08

Flickr’s Oldest Photos on “Life in Grayscale”

This article was written on April 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

life in grayscale Flickr is used for a handful of different purposes, but one of them is for users to post the photos they took with their digital camera for friends and family to see. That’s one of the purposes it serves me, and it’s nice to be able to go back and look at my photos from last week, last month, or last year. While a good chunk of the photos on Flickr are from more recent events in someone’s life, there are actually quite a few older pictures on there as well. When I say older, think early 1900’s.

To go back in time, there’s a site out there that has a collection of “old” photos from the Flickr library. The site is called Life In Grayscale and they make it easy to find photos from the time period in the past that interests you. Their collection starts with photos from the 1900’s and moves on up to 1970. Using an arrow, you can drag it across a timeline to select the years worth of photos that you want to see. In all, they have 18,484 photos that were taken between 1900 and 1970.

One of the photos I came across was labeled “My First Camera” from 1960 and what caught my attention was the size of the box. It was HUGE! I clicked through to view the image on Flickr and the caption read that it was a Brownie Flash II camera so I decided to look into that particular camera. As it turns out, it was a box camera made by Kodak which took 2 1/4 x 3 1/3″ exposures on type 620 film rolls. Can you imagine a camera these days covered in leather? The Kodak Brownie Flash was covered with imitation leather and a Flash could be connected to it. It originally launched in 1958.

They say you learn something new everyday, and today I learned about a Kodak Brownie Flash II camera. If you have a minute and older pictures interest you, check it out. I wouldn’t say Life in Grayscale is a site I’d visit regularly or even semi-regularly, but it was fun to quickly look through some of the pictures they’ve collected from Flickr that are from earlier times. And hey, by doing so, you might just learn something new.