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Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) Many were digitized by LOC contractors using a Sinar studio back. They are adjusted by your webmaster for contrast and color in Photoshop before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here.
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LBJ on LSD: 1967
Submitted by tterrace on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 6:52pm.
May 1967. I liked to see what weird effects I could get fooling around with the controls of our color TV. If you turned the horizontal hold just to the point where it was about to lose it, you'd get something like this. If the President of the United States happened to be on, that is.
Wasn't a hippie
Submitted by tterrace on Wed, 07/30/2008 - 4:28pm.
No, I didn't turn into a hippie, dangerous or otherwise. I was dangerous to our 1965 Montgomery Ward Airline color TV, however, and broke one of the controls on the back panel fiddling with it trying to get the picture "perfect." There was also a service switch that compressed the image down to a horizontal bar about 1/4" thick. I discovered that by opening the shutter of my camera and swiveling it back and forth from side I could get an effect like this, without drugs:
All part of a continuing fascination I had back then of taking pictures off the TV screen. For instance, I have shots of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley both in black and white and color. How many other people can say that?
Cheap Color TV
Submitted by Mr Mel on Wed, 07/30/2008 - 12:46pm.
There used to be transparent plastic sheets that had various colors running horizontally down. They came in different screen sizes, with 2 sided tape along the edges to fasten them to the black and white screen. The results were not unlike the LBJ picture above. It was the poor man's color TV. We sold plenty of them.
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Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.
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Today's Top 5