70 posts tagged “vintage photos”

Here's something interesting that happened the other day.

You may have seen this tile I made using one of Papas photos. It was taken in Paris in 1957.

 

 

Anyway, last week someone bought it, then sent me an email asking if I did any custom work. Turns out this lady had been to paris last year with her husband and said she had a photo of him in the same spot and could I make a similar tile using it. So I told her to email it to me and I'd have a look.

Well, she wasn't joking, and in fact if her husband wasn't actually in the photo it would just about be spot on. So I managed to make it pretty similar and these are going to be his christmas present.

 

So, here are some new tiles I made using Papa's slides.

Not sure if I've posted this one before but I'll post it again anyway because it's one of my favourites.

Golden Gate Bridge 1957

 

 

Chief Yellow Horse. Now I think this is along Route 66, but not sure exactly where. I did know, but I've forgotten. I did a bit of research but I think this has gone and there is a new building in its place. This is one of my favourites as well. It must have been 1957 as well. Because I'm sure they only went to America once. Although that car looks more '65.

 

 

This one was taken in Avoca, Ireland, in 1965

 

 

And this was 1965 as well. Cairo.

 

I've found America.

In the slide box that is.

I'm feeling a bit emotional actually.

This is a photo of my Papa. And that little contraption by his side is the camera he used to take all these photos we look at while he was on his world trip.

 

 

Amazing really. I often think of him and wonder what he would have made of the digital photography era. He developed his own photos, and when he died we cleared out his dark room. We took trailer loads of photos to the tip. Thousands. My father told me once that Papa asked him once if he wanted to go for a drive with him. He said they were gone for hours and hours because Frank (Papa) kept stopping to take photos. Dad said he took hundreds of photos.

After he had died, and Nan moved into a retirement home we cleared out the house. The sun room was full of National Geographic magazines. Thousands of them. He and Nan went on two world trips. One in 1957 and one in 1964. He must have had a real facination with the world.

He died one morning making toast. Nan said she heard the bang when he hit the ground. As you can see, he wasn't a small man. It was the way for someone like him to go.

Not so good for my Nan of course. She was very lonely after that.

I've never thought of them as being dead. I always imagine that they went off on another world trip and are having such a good time that they never came back.

I am absolutely buggered.

Do people say that in other places I wonder or is that another one of those Australian sayings. Because we say it all the time here. And when you think about it, its terribly inappropriate really. If you're tired you say you're buggered, if something breaks, you say its buggered, if you stuff something up you say, bugger, or bugger it. Although I did say it in woodwork once and the teacher freaked out and sent me out of class.

I guess I could say I feel rat shit. But that seems even stranger. How does a rat shit feel. But we seem to say that a lot as well. I feel rat shit, or if something breaks you say it's rat shit. i.e.  Can you fix it mate? Nah, she's rat shit.

Whatever term you want to use. I'm it. Very very tired.

Too many late nights, too much drinking, too many early mornings and early morning runs. Too much dust and too many windy dry days. Too much volunteering and too many tiles to make. And when I saw my brother on the weekend he gave me four more boxes of Papas slides to scan in, and I've done about 500 so far. And papa was a terrible speller and thats tiring as well.  But there are some beauties I must say.

So I'm looking forward to 5pm when I can sit back with a glass of wine and watch antiques roadshow. lol, sad but true. I love that show. I love seeing the look on someones face when they find out the bowl that the dogs been eating out of for the past ten years is worth a few thousand pounds.

So I shall share a few slides that I found and liked. These were taken in Ireland in 1965.

This is Papa. In his harry high pants. I thought you were supposed to kiss the blarney stone.

 

 

And here are some hardy little Galway girls.

 

 

And these ones were taken near galway as well

 

 

 

Well what can I say about my father.

He is a man of extreme emotions.

He is probably the most pig headed, hard arsed bastard you've ever met. But as a kid, just when you were about ready to run away from home or take a vow to never speak to him again, he'd do something really funny or thoughtful.

You know he used to yell at our friends when they came for sleepovers if he thought they needed it. Usually over something stupid. I think one time someone ate the last of the bread and he went off. He would swear and yell and rant. They must have been terrified of him. I remember him giving a guy staying with us a terrible verbal because he rode the motorbike like a dickhead and scared cows I think it was. It was certainly something I didn't experience when I went to my friends houses. Having their fathers yell at me.

But then there was also the time when I was out driving around the farm with him, heading towards dusk, and he said he had something special to show me. I was about ten I guess. He went and parked near one of the dams and told me I had to be really still and quiet and when it was almost dark hundreds of kangaroos came down to the dam to drink. I'll never forget that.

Or the time he went out with the gun to shoot a feral cat that was hanging around, only to come back in and say he couldn't do it because the cat stayed right where it was and looked him straight in the eye. Within six months that cat was called Thomas and was sitting in the kitchen every night waiting for dinner.

So happy fathers day to my dad, a complicated, annoying, charming, intelligent, pig headed old bastard.

 

 

 

For fathers day I had a rummage through his old metal tin he keeps photos in and made him some tiles that Mum had mounted on black board.

Here he is with his Mum. He told me his Dad though he looked like s girl with his blonde curls so took him to the barber and had it all cut off.

 

 

This one you've seen before probably. Here he is with his Mum and Dad.

 

 

And with his friends before he left for Australia

 

 

He remembers this day well. Happier days I think, before the war started.

 

 

This was a shop that was owned by his grandfather. it was all destroyed during the war. He wrote about staying there

In the summers we went to the small island of Sark for our holidays. We used to spend two months there at my grandfathers weekender. It was a bungalow with a shop at the front and consisted of one big room with four little bedrooms around it, each one fitted out like a ships cabin with two bunks and a little porthole to open. The island was a lovely place. I could run wild, it was very safe for a child. We could walk to the beach and the fishing was good out in the boat and it was I suppose a bit of a fools paradise really.

After the war we went over to Sark to look at our lovely old bungalow. Well it was burnt to the ground, not a thing left. So there were no more holidays in Sark. I think Dad was sick at heart. Those were nasty blows for my father.

 

 

This would have been taken in the fifties. When Dad first moved to Australia he found work on an orange farm

 

 

Papa took this one in 1957. These were the streamers coming from the cruise ship when it left Melbourne with Nan and Papa on it.

 

 

Hong Kong - 1964

 

 

This I think is in England so would be 1957

 

 

Trinidad - 1957

 

Pardon my blatant plug of a title, but I'm doing a test.

See I'm not sure how well Vox rates in the various search engines. So for people like myself, who are trying to sell things, I'm not sure how much use vox is.

So say I have a set of four ceramic tile coasters for sale at my madeit shop, and they have been made using vintage photos of moulin rogue girls taken by Papa in 1964, mixed with some vintage theatre posters. And say that each coaster measures 4 x 4 inches and comes with felt on the back.

So lets just say that. And then we'll see if anyone turns up here after searching for such a thing.

How long does it take for "things" to get picked up by search engines anyway? Or do you have to ping them or something.

I think blogger is better for that sort of thing - isn't blogger owned by google anyway? hmm, wonder if that matters. And who the hell is Bing!!

Maybe I should have a blogger blog just for the tiles and coasters. I have a website that directs people to the madeit shop but I'm just trialling that for six months to see how much traffic comes its way.

Any ideas? And is it your title or your content that is more important. What about tags, do they matter?

Oh, here are the coasters anyway - pretty cool

 

Papas slidebox. Bit of a mix here.

Planes. I really wish they'd stop falling out of the sky. I'm going to have a bugger of a time getting Daz and Kimba to Thailand at the end of the year. She flew to the Whitsundays this morning (poor dear), and sent me a text at 10am saying she was having a wine to calm her nerves.

 

Road trains. All over the roads in Australia. Huge long bloody things that are impossible to overtake.

 

And automobiles. Downtown Los Angeles 1964.

 

castlereagh street sydney 1952 - taken from The Australia Hotel roof

Bobbin Head

Circular Quay Sydney - under heavy smoke.

Bill - been shearing for thirty years - taken in 1952

Australian black and white photos taken by papa in 1952. Last time I saw Mum she gave me one of papa's photo albums she'd found. She said to take them and scan them because they were deteriorating. Some of them had blotchy markings on them and she told me to take them out of the album and give them a good wash under the tap. Well she did work with Papa in his studio so I assumed she knew what she was talking about, even though it sounded frightening. So wash away I did, but not all of them came clean and I did manage to leave a rubber glove print on one. She tells me just to wash it again.

A lot of these were taken on our farm. Which was Papa and his brother Hammy's farm at this time.

a good old australian gum tree

 

nice little kanagaroo face

 

browns cows

 

 

bushmans camp