digg

Join DiggAbout

HUGE Color panorama photo of Denver in 1898 (5836 × 1788 pixels) (PIC)

upload.wikimedia.org — Amazing to see such detail, considering the photo's over 100 years old. I'd love to see the same shot today.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • numberneal, on 11/18/2007, -6/+32nice shot. the technicolor makes it looks like an oil painting.
    • PARAPA, on 11/18/2007, -11/+4Seems pretty quiet. Barely anybody is in the photo
      • MrBabyMan, on 11/18/2007, -0/+24It's Denver in 1898. That was probably rush hour.
      • whataboutdave, on 11/18/2007, -0/+4Cameras had longer exposures back then as well. There is a chance that people walking around wouldn't even show up at that distance.
    • UberNick, on 11/18/2007, -9/+3Nah, totally 'shopped.
    • lex0nyc, on 11/18/2007, -0/+7Too early to be Technicolor. I wonder what process was used. It's possible that it is a hand-painted black and white shot.
    • EgaoNoGenki, on 11/18/2007, -3/+4"Makes it look," not "makes it looks."
      • iwinyoulose, on 11/19/2007, -3/+2And makes you look like a douche.
    • graemee, on 11/18/2007, -2/+2The early colour process used uses potato starch as a medium, gives the pictures a watercolour look.
      It's called autochrome technique invented by the Lumiere bothers in Paris in 1907

    • terracottapai, on 11/18/2007, -0/+5Does anyone here actually know what Technicolor is?
      This ain't it.
    • ophello, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1i guess the only colors they had back then were brown and green
      (and every permutation of the two)
    • davecor, on 11/19/2007, -0/+4It's hand tinted. Good old fashioned watercolor and paintbrush technology. It was a real art and they had all kinds of masking techniques - frisket, tape, latex etc. I used to play with it back in the early '80s.
  • badwithcomputer, on 11/18/2007, -19/+50That John Denver's full of *****.
    • SuperWinner, on 11/18/2007, -10/+7My favorite quote from dumb and dumber.
    • Torx, on 11/18/2007, -4/+9seriously, who would dig this down?
      • doshindude, on 11/18/2007, -6/+9smart people who think it's completely irrelevant.
        • kajoob, on 11/19/2007, -4/+2Smart people on digg? Have you read the comments?
    • andregriffin, on 11/18/2007, -1/+23A blank tape is $2.99.
      A John Denver tape is 99 cents.
  • cosmikdebris, on 11/18/2007, -3/+47Agreed, I like to see the same vista taken today and compare.
    • colto, on 11/18/2007, -80/+5I wonder how many people are going to think that you are talking about Microsoft Vista and digg you down?
      • colinbrady, on 11/18/2007, -1/+46not many.
        • petebert, on 11/18/2007, -3/+2dont diggers have "vista" in their auto bury?
      • OneLess, on 11/18/2007, -1/+8Actually you seem to be the only one who thought about MS Vista. Kind of ironic.
      • expert01, on 11/19/2007, -1/+2Not as many as dugg YOU down
    • BearinG, on 11/23/2007, -0/+1I love those old pictures..always interesting comparing then and now.

      Here are pictures (powerpoint presentation unfortunatly) from my home town, Hull/Gatineau, Quebec (which I am standing in right now, in the bigger buildings..).. its very nice when its actually a place you know or have been to..

      http://www.bestsharing.com/files/BVWBNf371045/Vill ...
  • kenvsryu, on 11/18/2007, -5/+64I'm glad the (PIC) tag was added.
  • philthetechie, on 11/18/2007, -9/+29I'll be in Denver in 3 days, I'll do my best to track down the same location and snap a panorama
    • kajoob, on 11/18/2007, -2/+96no you won't
    • djphatjive, on 11/18/2007, -0/+15I live in denver and can't even figure out where that is!
    • wisammy, on 11/18/2007, -9/+2why do you even care? so people on digg can see a picture of denver that I am sure you can find 100000 places on the web. Plus you won't do it.
    • EgaoNoGenki, on 11/18/2007, -1/+5You go, Phil!
    • textalon, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2Somewhere around E. Colfax Ave. and Emerson St. is my guess.......can't guess what would have been that tall back then but the Capitol.
      • MateyO, on 11/19/2007, -0/+3The triangular building to the right is The Brown Palace. The diagonal street in the foreground looks like Broadway, and the main street extending to the west is probably what is now 16th street. This really looks like it could have been taken from the capitol building.
        • textalon, on 11/19/2007, -0/+0Is the large domed building that's left of center in the old photo the Capitol?
      • Ansible, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2You can google Brown Palace on google maps, then check out the area on the street level view. I think the brown palace is about the only thing still standing around there from that era. Too bad, some of those old buildings look pretty cool.
    • LightningRose, on 11/19/2007, -0/+0It was taken from the dome of the State Capitol, which was under constrution at the time. See my post below for more info.
      Here's a link for tour info:
      http://www.state.co.us/gov_dir/leg_dir/lcsstaff/Ca ...
  • DaviDaviDaviD, on 11/18/2007, -1/+10Great shot. Just amazing to see no cars in a city, seems sort of eerie! Brilliant quality too.
    • expert01, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2If you look close on that long road in the center, you can see lots of carriages though. And people.
  • lhbaker, on 11/18/2007, -13/+5Sorry. By 'HUGE' I understandably thought you meant 'hi-res.'
  • pelline, on 11/18/2007, -1/+7Great panorama, looks like a beautiful city.
  • unreg, on 11/18/2007, -5/+14I can see my house
  • lhbaker, on 11/18/2007, -0/+9I's really shocking how much of what is in this photo no-longer exists. The mansions in the right foreground are parking lots and hotels, but there are still a bunch like them to the east of this area. It wouldn't be recognizeable but for the Brown Palace. The church steeple to the right of the Palace is still there, surrounded by sky-scrapers.
    • MateyO, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2You can see the smokestack of what is now the Tivol (student union at DU), and at about the 1:30 position, another smoke stack that's the 'Old Spaghetti Factory'....Pity you can't see Union Station from this vantage point.
      • leahmcleahson, on 11/20/2007, -0/+1You mean at Auraria campus. Good eye, though.
    • bingobongony, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2It is 109 years! Not shocking at all that most of the landscape is different. Esepcially for a western city.
  • Kurt37, on 11/18/2007, -7/+6I think I see my dad.
    • IllBeBack, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2Luke... Search your feelings.
    • captainnico, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1son of a bitch is down there somewhere
  • InspectorGadget, on 11/18/2007, -2/+4This is going to be my next Compiz Fusion skydome.
  • adam07, on 11/18/2007, -1/+4Nice to see a pic of my hometown on digg. The skyline is a lot different now with the Cash Register building, the Qwest building, the Republic Plaza and other skyscrapers.
    • aduzik, on 11/20/2007, -0/+1My friend and I have a game: whenever you see the big blue Qwest sign on the side of the Qwest building, you declare, "I win." It sounds lame, it is lame, but it is surprisingly fun.
  • mediaspree, on 11/18/2007, -0/+8Rivers are more condusive to trade than mountains.
  • alperea, on 11/18/2007, -0/+31I can see Casa Bonita! :)
    • ajchavar, on 11/18/2007, -1/+6my birthday last summer, i was in the area and my buddies took me to casa bonita. it is EXACTLY as described/depicted in south park. it was fantastically bad, and so much fun. i was surprised that there actually were cliff divers, and a mariachi band that sang happy birthday to me.

      sopapillas ftw!
      • anachronaut, on 11/19/2007, -0/+6Casa Bonita has the world's worst "Mexican" food. Their bean burritos are literally tasteless refried beans straight out of a can with gobs of Cheez Whiz. The food quality at Taco Bell is far, FAR superior to Casa Bonita. Fantastically bad is exactly right... I'd even go so far as to say that the food there is breathtakingly, nauseatingly bad.

        It's a good thing they have cliff divers and other gimmicks to distract people from the inedible food.
  • Roads01, on 11/18/2007, -2/+3You should see Denver now...
  • bubbakja, on 11/18/2007, -0/+9I think the giant "palace stables" sign near the bottom left corner about sums up how times have changed
  • Askiba, on 11/18/2007, -7/+3There's a few tears in the picture! OMG NOT ROFL WHINE WHINE WHINE!

    But seriously, it's an amazing picture. We had photography nerds back then?
    • InitialDMP5, on 11/18/2007, -0/+6uhhhh I think the photography nerds were roamed in bigger herds back then. Taking pictures was still an amazing thing back then and not everyone had the ability to take pictures. You had to have the equipment and the patience. Knowing how to take a picture back then meant having to know that camera pretty damn well. Also there was no photoshop to put together a panorama image or color correct or anything. It was all done on negatives and through color processes. An amazing time for film in general (still and motion)
  • scaaven2, on 11/18/2007, -3/+28I just dropped my beer and caught it in mid-air
  • richardiscool, on 11/18/2007, -9/+2This has just been really badly coloured in Photoshop.
    • joshuaer, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2I would not say badly, it looks ok to me.
    • masgrada, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2haha. photoshop... riiiiight.
    • ophello, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1its called hand tinting, and photoshop is not god.
  • u8eR, on 11/18/2007, -4/+7http://www.bylandwaterandair.com/images/usa/denver ... : Denver now.
  • Toshibi, on 11/18/2007, -2/+9That pic would make a great puzzle.
  • darlyn, on 11/18/2007, -3/+2How come all the streets are empty?
    • joshuaer, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2they are not empty you can see some horses and people on them, but if you take away cars think about how many people you see on the street in a small town in the middle of a day.
    • Regarius, on 11/18/2007, -5/+2Gas was really expensive back then, so not many people drove. Duh.
    • gromnie, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1Long exposure time. Anything that moved too much doesn't show up as more than a ghost. If you look at the large street running off into the distance, you can see many smears and smudges in the road. Those a re carriages, and the smaller ones are people.
  • GruntboyX, on 11/18/2007, -9/+4I am not saying its fake...but i just get this feeling. Either way it was fun to look at.
  • kiiwii, on 11/18/2007, -1/+16Whoa, I didn't realize they had 10 megapixel cameras back in 1898! ;-)
    • InitialDMP5, on 11/18/2007, -3/+5I saw the wink, but man I hope you were in fact joking. FILM has infinitely more resolution than a digital camera. HD is yet to even get close to film.
    • ophello, on 11/19/2007, -1/+1@ kiiwii
      oh man...know you nothing of large-format negatives?

      its called a view camera, and theyve been around longer than the internet and digital cameras. stay awake in history class!
  • jdmcadam, on 11/18/2007, -3/+11Anyone have 109 year old colour panoramas of interesting cities?
  • acid0426, on 11/18/2007, -9/+1Denver = Assassin's Creed settting?
  • joshuaer, on 11/18/2007, -1/+7The Closest to Carbon neutral Denver has ever been!
  • afdlips, on 11/18/2007, -1/+2wow. This is crazy. I'm rendering a panorama of Denver right now.
  • thebrawl, on 11/18/2007, -3/+4They should have used a higher megapixel camera
  • doshindude, on 11/18/2007, -3/+2Pics or it didn't......wait.
  • sharkyl, on 11/18/2007, -0/+2Actually there are several cars (or perhaps carriages?) and people in the image. The reason you can't really see them is that the exposure time is so long that they have been turned into blurs. Look at the one blur making a left turn off the main street. There's another one nearby that clearly was a car that probably took off and left while the image was being exposed. Long exposure times are how you got this kind of detail with film in the old days.
    • expert01, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1Except you're thinking of cars when most of these were probably horse drawn carriages.
  • wario, on 11/18/2007, -0/+38john fielder did a whole book, of pictures in 1870 and in 2000 from the same locations, the picture in questions then and now
    http://www.johnfielder.com/detail.php?id=06041 1870
    http://www.johnfielder.com/detail.php?id=06042 2000
    • expert01, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2Interesting that the 1870 and 1898 pictures were taken in almost the exact same spot.
    • mhusson, on 11/19/2007, -4/+1John Fielder Sucks
    • LightningRose, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1I think the "1870" photo was actually taken only a couple of years before the 1898 photo for the following reasons:
      1) The elevated perspective in both photos show they were both taken from the state capitol, which was built over several years in the 1890's.
      2) If you zoom in the panorama and mat it to a similar size, you'll notice the trees are pretty much the same size. With a 28 year difference, the panorama trees would be much larger.
      3) The following postcard shows a building in the right foreground that also appears in the panorama, but is missing in the "1870" photo. The postcard is dated 1919 and also shows the landmark D+F clock tower (still standing) built in 1910.
      http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~rocky/PostcardHTML/ ...
  • VioletAvenger, on 11/18/2007, -1/+2Great pic, but thankfully more colors have been invented over the years!
    • solid12345, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2Yes I wonder who won the nobel prize for inventing the color red, where would society be without it?
  • Ajjah, on 11/18/2007, -2/+2I see telephone poles o_0
    • raano, on 11/19/2007, -1/+1Probably telegraph poles
      • potterboy, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1Telephone polls are quite possible for this point in time.
  • ryanonfire, on 11/18/2007, -4/+1Where are the people?
  • ledguitar, on 11/18/2007, -2/+3I did it... I found Waldo!
  • senkmajer, on 11/18/2007, -1/+2It's not that I am definitively disputing the date, but are those telephone poles or electric lines? I'm having trouble finding the time when electricity and / or phone service was brought to Denver. Any help?
  • Dylson, on 11/18/2007, -2/+1New background thx.
  • metalfalsetto, on 11/18/2007, -4/+0Good call. The LOC has a HUGE collection of panoramas of various US cities around the same time frame — clicky: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/panoramic_ ...
  • mikeyhell, on 11/18/2007, -5/+0Looks like 1889 for the first sign of electricity.
    http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/P ...
  • mikeyhell, on 11/18/2007, -4/+0my link is managled:
    http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/P ...
  • Forkboy2, on 11/19/2007, -3/+5Here are some big historic aerial photos of a few cities if you're into this kind of thing. Remove the "_sm" if you want to see really huge versions.

    Chicago 1938 - http://www.gelib.com/maps/Hist_Aerials/Source/Chic ...
    Los Angeles 1948 - http://www.gelib.com/maps/Hist_Aerials/Source/LA_1 ...
    Oakland 1946 - http://www.gelib.com/maps/Hist_Aerials/Source/Oakl ...
    San Francisco 1946 - http://www.gelib.com/maps/Hist_Aerials/Source/SanF ...

    If you have Google Earth, I've overlayed some of them onto Google Earth. Here is KML file. http://www.gelib.com/maps/Hist_Aerials/Hist_Aerial ...


  • 68024, on 11/19/2007, -1/+2Cool picture and no doubt technologically modern for the date it was taken. I'm not *that* surprised about the detail however, considering that 35mm film had not yet been invented and most film (if it even was film and not some kind of plate) was the size of A5 paper or something (that's about half the size of US 'letter' standard).
  • haxx4, on 11/19/2007, -0/+5The beauty is largely from the absence of now-ubiquitous billboards.
    • gromnie, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1Oddly enough, if you look around you'll find plenty of advertising, though. It's mostly painted on fences. The left side towards the back has some fences with upwards of thirty ads painted on them.
  • Wellzzer01, on 11/19/2007, -4/+0Where are the people?
    • crestfall, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2i don';t think anyone was told to stand still for the duration of the exposure.
  • mog86, on 11/19/2007, -3/+0Actually that looks Cheyenne, Wyoming and not Denver. The capitol building matches that of Cheyenne and the street layout doesn't match denver.....
    • rdhender, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1No, you can clearly see the Brown Palace in the foreground...
    • tyboulder, on 11/19/2007, -0/+2...yeah, and then there the whole Rocky Mountain thing going on in the background.
  • Spartandog, on 11/19/2007, -0/+4The colors are typical of the hand-tinted postcards of the time, which is why there is a limited range of colors. Most likely it was a brochure image. I have a tourist brochure of Montana with similar kinds of images from 1900.

    • davecor, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1I have no idea why you got a digg-down - you are right. Long before color technology of any kind, hand-tinting was very popular.
  • tmpoirier, on 11/19/2007, -0/+1I think the Brown Palace is the building in the right 1/3d of the picture with the rounded corners. It's most likely Denver.
  • mog86, on 11/19/2007, -4/+1look
    wyoming capitol: http://216.98.200.194/brs/images1/Wyoming%20Capito ...
    denver capitol: http://www.pictureninja.com/pages/united-states/co ...
  • Fetching more discussions...
    Show 51 - 59 of 59 discussions
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.