Our last image from Germany for now, a lovely pastoral scene along the Regnitz (I think). The last of the German scenes from my father’s collection of Kodachrome slides shot in 1955-56, for now, at least (see the full story here).
Littoral Pastoral
Tag: Germany
Rathaus
One of our final stops in Germany, Bamberg’s old Town Hall (Rathaus), I’m pretty sure. This is from the collection of Kodachrome slides my father shot in 1955-56 that I’ve been scanning and posting about for the last few weeks
Old Bamberg
Some more images my father shot on Kodachrome in Germany in 1955-56. The first is my mother pulling on a bell pull somewhere in the old town, the second a look, evidently at the cobblestones.
If interested in the project of scanning the old slides, you can read about it here. A brief technical addendum: as I mentioned in another earlier post, I am attempting a transition from Lightroom to Capture One. However, Capture One has far weaker retouching capabilities (you can only use one source area per layer and these slides needed massive amounts of retouching for hairs, stains and God knows what all). Therefore I worked on them in Lightroom and then exported as a catalog. Unfortunately, I discovered to my chagrin that while Capture One will import and interpret many types of image adjustments, rotation, flipping and retouching are not among them, so unless I export image files with the adjustments embedded in them and then re-import them (doubling the storage required for 300 high-res TIFFs) they’re not really useful to me in Capture One. Fortunately, because this is an archival project of images that aren’t even mine I don’t anticipate needing to work on them much again.
die Kirchen
Some more pictures of the Bamberg area taken in 1955-56 on Kodachrome slide film by my father.
According to Wikipedia, “Bamberg extends over seven hills, each crowned by a beautiful church. This has led to Bamberg being called the “Franconian Rome” — although a running joke among Bamberg’s tour guides is to refer to Rome instead as the “Italian Bamberg”. The hills are Cathedral Hill, Michaelsberg, Kaulberg/Obere Pfarre, Stefansberg, Jakobsberg, Altenburger Hill and Abtsberg.” I’m not sure which of these are pictured below, or even if these are all churches and not some of the many Schlösser my mother told me about but couldn’t identify.
You can see the original post describing this slide-scanning project here.
Alleyways and Rooftops
Staying in Bamberg, Germany, we continue to explore Kodachrome slides my father shot when he was in the Army in the 1950s (you can read about the project here). Bamberg is a UNESCO world heritage site, its oldest cathedral dating to the beginning of the 11th century. You can get a sense of that age in these images.
Regnitz
Continuing with the Kodachrome slides my father shot in Europe in the mid-1950s (original story in this post), we remain in Germany.
According to my mother, Bamberg is known as Klein-Venedig (“Little Venice”) because of its canal, although Wikipedia suggests no canal but the River Regnitz and only a colony of fishermen’s houses from the 19th century along one bank of the river get that appellation. Here are a few snaps of the waterway, the middle one featuring my mother.
Bamberg Market
Bamberg
Continuing with the exploration of my father’s Kodachrome slides from the 1950s (see the original post here), we turn to Germany. Most of the upcoming images were taken in Bamberg, the town where my father was billeted in an apartment with my mother. They were there from approximately the summer of 1955 to the summer of 1956 with trips to England, Switzerland and around Germany in between.
We’ll start with a trio of images, I think all taken in the same spot, some kind of stone balcony overlooking the town, (perhaps at the Rose Garden?) with one portrait each of my mother, my father and my father with an army buddy my mother identified as Chet, “who came at the weekends and never left.”
The bottom shot was a kind of monochrome greeny-yellow. I tried adding some warmth to it, not very successfully and made the sky bluish to add a little interest (winds up looking like one of those hand-tinted B&Ws). Needless to say, while I’ve been calling these “my fathers slides,” and it’s possible he set the camera up on a tripod, I think it unlikely he took at least 2 of these.