Talk Porty ~ Portobello

Margeorie Mekie collects and trades postcards and has a particular interest in Portobello. I'm delighted to announce that she has very kindly agreed to allow me to make these available on Portobello Online so that we can all share her enjoyment of this treasure trove of a collection. It's a wonderful gesture that will be appreciated by many.

If you have enjoyed the postcard gallery so far, then boy are you in for a treat!

You may be interested to know that Margeorie has produced a very interesting book of postcards of Portobello, entitled:

Old Portobello

Technical notes:

It's tempting to 'improve' Margeorie's postcards by removing scratches and other imperfections, adjusting the contrast etc but I have decided not to do this. Apart from re-sizing to a standard 640 pixels wide, this is exactly how they scanned.

I'm not an expert at image scanning so I would appreciate any advice. I'm using a fairly old Snapscan 1212U and scanning at 150 dpi to produce a tiff that is resized in Microsoft Photo Premium 10 and uploaded as a jpeg. The original tiff files will be copied to disk and may be of use for other projects as Margeorie sees fit.

Although Margeorie has over 1000 postcards in her collection (and still collecting!) there are only very minor differences in many and for this reason we will probably not use all of them. The trickery employed by these photo manipulators back at the beginning of the early 20th Century puts today's Photoshoppers to shame.

To illustrate this, let's have a little game of 'spot the difference'. I think this is just two photographs taken a minute or so apart.

However, there is clearly some trickery involved here. Not only has the caption changed, but that chimney seems to have disappeared.

There are lots of examples. Sometimes the change can be very minor. Small details are added or removed. In other cases, the alteration is much more dramatic, no more so than in this example.