As promised, here is the other panoramic image of the New Tomorrowland construction (also from March 1967). This is the photo I used in my presentation at Destination D. As before, I scanned this photo in at 400 dpi, and it encompasses slightly more than 1MB.
TECH HELP PLEASE: Could some of you computer gurus leave me some comments on if this is coming through as high quality as I think it is? On my Mac I can click on the image and zoom in to pretty amazing detail (enough to see the two hanging light shades in the window of the House of the Future). On my PC (both a desktop and a laptop), I seem to be able to do the same thing, but I am not getting the same detail. I know that there is only so much detail you can get out of an image and it is based on the original photo (negative size, camera, etc.). After four or five “zooms” I do start to get some pixelation, which I know is the limit of the image. However, being such a large file (well, maybe not in the world of high-speed connections), is it worth clicking on and are you getting the detail I want you to have? I am not a Tech guy, I am a historian (who knows his way pretty well around a computer — but not enough to know if this is working like I would like it to). I appreciate any comments you might leave me in regards to this. I am also always interested in any Tech-type help you can share. I have thousands of rare photos and documents (after three decades of collecting Walt Disney historical material), and I want to share it in such a way that it works for everybody. Sorry for rambling, but I appreciate any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques (I will anxiously be checking my Comments Section over the next few days).
Paul, are you scanning from a print or from a negative (or even a film positive)? Prints are much less flexible… you can enlarge them a little bit, and there are various Photoshop plugins that might help you with some of the grain (though I know you might not be using Photoshop). Negatives and slides generally afford a much better level of detail, you can scan them at a surprisingly high resolution; depending on the quality of the photo itself, you can get some remarkable results.
File size is always a concern on the internet, but for neat photos like the two Tomorrowland examples, I’m sure most people would not mind waiting a few extra seconds if necessary.
Anyway, the photos look good to me! I might play around with the contrast a little bit to brighten them up, but it isn’t really necessary. Thanks for sharing.
Paul; I’m using a PC and can click on the image but can only soom in once. If you hadn’t of told me I wouldn’t have known those were lamps; it is very detailed, however.
Paul, where does one come across an image like this?
I can only zoom once by clicking on the photo. I can zoom more when I save it to my Mac. The image size is 22.22 inches by 8.596 inches at 72 pixels per inch. Pretty nice detail. I would love to see a scan at twice that size or resolution, but depending on the detail on the original, it may not really matter. Great image, thanks for sharing.
To Major Pepperidge: Most of my images come from a print, I do have a handful of negatives (less than a hundred). This refers to the “rare” stuff, the material I have collected from Imagineering and so forth. I do have vacation slides and have experimented a bit with those, and I’m amazed at how clear they come out. The two New Tomorrowland images are very high-quality photographs (professionally taken for Disney). So I think that is why the detail is so good, as you suggested. They were both scanned at 400 dpi. Does that mean if I scanned them at 600 dpi and uploaded them, it would make a huge difference. Ultimately, I know there is a limit in which the actual image will not give anymore detail. But as I mentioned the detail I get on my Mac is pretty good. I have not used Photoshop, but just got a copy of CS4 so I am trying to learn my away around (after 15 years of using a very old [almost DOS] photo editing program, that doesn’t even exist anymore).
Thank you for your comments and the help. Most appreciated. Paul
Cyberdillo: First off, good to see you at Destination D. Sorry I was always on the run somewhere, didn’t have hardly any spare time. And it is the same on my PC, I can only zoom in once with the mouse. On the Mac, the zoom in is just once with the Mouse, but the Noodle + (Plus) goes in as much as I want. After five zooms, the pixelation starts, but by that point I have incredible detail (especially on the Mac Cinema Screen). If anyone knows how to do this with a PC, please let me know. Thanks again for taking the time to comment. Paul
Gregory Wright: Thanks for the information. The zoom capability must be a Mac thing (still learning my way around, having only converted to the Dark Side less than a year ago — after close to 20 years on the PC). For what I am trying to do here at the DHI, Mac is the way to go, and I love it. In fact, my presentations at Destination D were all done in Keynote (which was tough as an old Power Point guy). But after I learned my way around. WOW! Anyway, I will go through some material and try to find another New Tomorrowland photo that is worthy to post here at DHI (to be honest, I have tons of images from the construction, but so much of it is not very exciting). With that, I do as you request and scan it higher to see what comes of it and await comments on the clarity and so forth. I know that your scanner has a lot to do with it, and I just upgraded to a “Mac” Scanner, but I have yet to install it and get it going.
Finally, is the Gregory Wright that I used to pal around with back in the 1990s at the various NFFC Disneyana Conventions? And San Diego ComicCon? Paul
Nate: Thanks for your question. To make a REALLY long story as short as I can, it was self preservation. Having done Disney history and research back to the 1980s, I’ve lived through it all. What affected my search for material was when, in the early 1990s, the Disney Archives became very exclusive (fortunately, I was still allowed to go), and ultimately was cut off to ALL outside researchers (I was mid-project at the time, and it took a special dispensation, basically a letter from Dave Smith, Roy E. Disney, Howard Greene, and a host of others, to get me back in). In the 1990s it was always a problem discussed when Disney historians got together. So around 1991 I decided that if the Archives was ever cut off, I would have to be a Civil War historian … which I did not want (my degrees are in history, but the subject of my interest is obvious). So I started to seek out historical material anywhere and everywhere I could. Disneyana Shows. Hollywood Collector Shows. Howard Lowery Auctions (a virtual Gold Mine in the 1990s). Other Archives (National Archives, UCLA, USC, and on). Some I would purchase direct, when a child of a Disney old timer might be looking to sell off their mom or dad’s material (not knowing what else to do with it). Also, as I was doing the interviews with the legends and old-timers, I would ask them if they had historical material of interest (documents, transcripts, letters, journals, photos, negatives, artwork, et al.). If they said yes, I would ask them if I could make copies, stating my purpose was to preserve Disney history. I would also let them know, if I made copies, another set of their records would be available to their family should anything happen to the originals (fire, flood, etc.). I had a very good reputation with the old-timers (enough to be made an honorary member of their club “The Disney Dinosaurs”), and so many of them let me copy whatever I wanted (it helped that usually my introduction to them came from Ken Anderson … so I had “references”). So after two decades of this (again, self preservation), I managed to collect the second largest Archives on Walt Disney (no need to tell you who is number one). Hope this answers the question, and I hope I didn’t go too overboard. It has been a passion of mine (Walt and his legacy) and I think I just got addicted to knowledge of any kind on the subject. Paul
Yep. I’m that Gregory Wright. Sorry we lost touch for a time! Love seeing you out there again. Welcome to the Mac world! We’ll have to catch up offsite soon.
Paul, my guess is that if you scanned this same image at 600 dpi vs. 400, you would wind up with a larger image (of course) and *noticeably* more grain. Viewers might be able to discern a bit more detail due to the sheer size of the image; results would vary from photo to photo. I have to say though, when I zoom in on your current scan several times in my browser, it holds up quite nicely.
And btw, scanners make a big difference! When I bought a new scanner a few years ago, I tried scanning a slide at 2400 dpi (standard for me) and compared it to the exact same image scanned on the OLD scanner at 2400 dpi, and the difference was astonishing. I can only imagine what a brand new device would do today (time to go shopping!).