Get lost in the onlookers, ugly restaurants, caves, and, of course, same sky postcards in James’s incredible full online collection by clicking this link, SwellMap on Flickr 👇 www.flickr.com/photos/94207108@N02/albums Have fun! -Coleman

“Even though we live in different place, we live under the same sky”

Imagine vox just messages you on the internet and invites you to just do a whole video on your niche hobby lol

I will be here for Darkroom as long as you keep making it Coleman. Amazing work as always!!!

I say this with the utmost respect: for such an obsessive collector he seems surprisingly sane and fun!

As someone who makes stock photos, it was immediately obvious why all those postcards had the same sky. The original sky was boring, and the replacement sky made the image much more interesting to look at.

I love how excited James is about talking about his postcards.

From a printing perspective it would be a way to control the ink going down on the press if all the skies were a similar color it would use the same amount of ink in certain places. This is from a color separation standpoint. It would also provide even coverage

My first thought when seeing this video's title was "the sky was boring and they replaced it with a stock" because it's a staple of photo retouching. When I was working in marketing, I had to replace skies just about any time we photographed a client's business. You just don't have the luxury to wait for optimal visual weather. Now that I teach graphic design and illustration, the very first composite exercise I give to students is a sky replacement because they're simple, easy and about as common as you can get. Edit: Reading this back it sounded annoyed, so I should add that I enjoyed the video, as I always do, I'm just a little amused that your graphics department probably could've answered the question without a flight to British Columbia.

this kinda makes me want to collect postcards now

"There's no way of knowing why they left some skies untouched." Cut to a shot of a postcard with a nice blue sky that doesn't need retouching - that's your answer right there! As someone who's done sky replacement for property listings, if it's an overcast day, you replace it - if it's nice and sunny, no need to bother.

Mad props to the artists who did those matte jobs and tone matching so perfectly in the pre-Photoshop era.

What a cool nugget of history, his collection is pretty cool too.

I have a bit of a different idea here. Given that the source images were likely taken on slide film (kodachrome) we have to consider the dynamic range of the film. Kodachrome has a dynamic range of around 7 stops which is not a lot. Consequently, it's very difficult to have a well exposed foreground as well as sky in a picture. Especially if the sky is overcast. If your main subject is well exposed, the sky will almost always be completely blown out. Funnily enough, a completely blown out sky in a slide will be completely transparent. This could make it very easy to slide in a stock photo sky behind it as a replacement. Could it be that these beautiful skies were used whenever it was necessary to replace a blown out sky in a picture?

You should have ended the story with a picture of you and James with the same sky behind you. :)

We think of stock photos being a digital-era phenomena, so it's really cool to see the same thought process clearly happened back in the analogue processes of the mid-20th century

Seeing Mr PG makes me happy ❤️

When you replace a sky, having a sky that you know the values of for printing is really very helpful.

It's poetic in a way, to have such a subtle similarity linking all these different places together

I believe the "onlooker" landscape style was common among landscape photographers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. My grandmother was an award winning landscape photographer in that era and most of her photos had onlookers (often dressed in bright colors that clashed with the landscape). She spent decades teaching others to take landscape photos and led photo travel groups to places like Hawaii or Vermont in the Fall. I'm sure she taught others to add onlookers to their works. It doesn't surprise me that postcards from that era used that same composition style. Great video! Cheers.

The most fascinating thing for me is confirmation that there is ALWAYS someone who will collect something and there will ALWAYS be a magazine for them 😃

Chrome-Era postcards will always remind me of my grandparents. I would get one everytime they traveled to a new place. I loved this visit into something so simple, but meaningful. ❤ Thank you.

Plot Twist: Dexter was a memer running a meme machine.

From a film photography perspective, sometimes correct exposure for a subject, like a building on a street, can result in the sky to be overexposed, if you aimed for the correct exposure for the sky, then this can result in the subject to be underexposed. This is actually very common even today and its simply because the sky typically the brightest part of the overall scene. By having a correctly exposed stock image of a sky background, photos that had the exposure set to capture the subject rather than the sky in the background and resulted in perhaps less aesthically pleasing sky could quickly have the best of both worlds.

When's the last time you sent a postcard? Let us know in the comments below 📬

Vox makes me interested in things I would never be interested in.

"There's no way to know for sure why they replaced some skies and seemingly left others untouched." We can't know 100%, but I suspect that if you had the time to find other photographs of the same locations, you would find power lines, phone lines, billboards, marquee signs, trees, and other buildings that didn't seem to suit a postcard. That is to say that same skies were likely replacements not just for original skies, but for whatever they wanted removed from the not-yet-postcardified scenes.

01:48 imagine if she just rick rolled him, thats what i would do to be honest

I was thinking that the "onlookers" have also been retouched to appear to be all wearing red, even if they likely were not in reality. Maybe they just painted a translucent red over the original, or cut out some material like cellophane?

As a production artist, this makes my little "use templates and presets for sanity and profit" heart happy.

This is THE best series in KZfaq! Respect to all the great research and interviews that are done.

genuinely the best piece of fun, lighthearted journalism I've seen in AGES! 10/10 to anyone involved in making this

This was beautiful. This man’s passion for these things seems so wholesome.

This is heartwarming! Really love it, great job Coleman!

As a kid, I wondered why some postcards looked like the buildings or other objects were cut out and pasted onto the sky. I also noticed the general recurring blue sky theme, but not that it was truly the same sky. And in some cases, it feels like a coloring mismatch. I ended up taking it to be some kind of color manipulation designed to make the images "pop", and to make the buildings/land stand out. I never considered that they were actually cutting out the objects and pasting them onto stock sky images.

This channel keeps on answering questions I did not ask and I love it.

loved the storytelling style here. as a postcard collector myself, it was great to learn that there can be such an interesting tale behind even such mundane-looking postcards.

Now this is the kind of content I like. Awesome video. James seems really passionate about his collection and it is very inspiring

I love how he found the beauty in that they all had the same sky, giving more attention to details below. Always a silver lining.

How delightful to learn about a tiny facet of the world like this. Just wonderful, thank you.

I am SO glad I watched this. I still have the postcards I collected from when I was younger(1990's), this video made me bring them back out. It turns out that I also have some of the cloud photos. Of course, all by Dexter. Weirdly, I never noticed it before.

I’m so glad this confirms how I thought old postcard looked matted It’s obvious to me, but I didn’t know so many had the exact same background

Love this kind of journalism :)

Fascinating. As a postcard collector in hiatus this video could get me fired up again. Loved the topical nature of his collecting, people standing in views, same sky, etc. And he stays with the relatively inexpensive chrome postcard as compared to the earlier formats. Nice.

What an amazing collection, and I'm so glad he's scanned them and put them online- this is a huge preservation effort, and there's probably a lot of American history hidden in this collection! Such a cool video.

Thank you thank you thank you! As a photographer and photography lover this is priceless!!!

I legit couldnt stop skiling all throughout the video. This is so fascinating!

Love this series!

transports me back to every postcard rack, in every Stuckey's, we browsed on endless road trips in the '60s--oblivious that we were mailing all those same skies, brilliant! great piece, thanks.

As a nature/suburbia photographer and professional retoucher, sky replacement is actually something I do a lot. When the focus is on the foreground and your angles, and subject is sometimes something you can control, the sky rarely is also that. I actually make an effort to use different skies (some stock, some I've taken myself) and not repeat so often, but I actually loved the same pattern repeating like James was describing. Beautiful, nostalgic collection he has there.

I am so glad I am a subscriber! Awesome story!

This made me smile throughout

Thanks for doing this video, it brought back so many memories. You see, Thomas Dexter was my grandfather and I grew up running around Dexter Press with all the printing presses, the art department, the bindery where the postcards were cut to individual cards from stacks of big sheets of printed postcards that were ultimately shipped to customers. My mother, as a child, "helped" my grandfather develop his color separation process that enabled him to print natural color (although they enhanced the red color for visual appeal) postcards and the process that led to the gang printing of the postcards on large sheets of paper. My grandfather was a great guy. Dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the Army, but he had a printing class in high school shop that he really enjoyed. Oh, there are so many good stories, like being 16 and the Army knowing it so they kept him in New York City as a driver for officers, including the WW 1 ace pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, with a female companion or two. After the war he started a weekly newspaper business. One side story to the newspaper business was the time he got a call from a sports writer at one of the large newspapers in NYC to see if my grandfather would let Babe Ruth deer hunt on his property in the mountains north of NYC. My mother got a signed baseball out of that hunting trip. He began playing with Kodachrome chemistry and even corresponded with George Eastman from Kodak. My mother talks about making color separations using the bathtub as a way to avoid spilling the chemicals in their home. Once he perfected his technique he began to print the natural color postcards. He told me that existing postcards did not have a lot, if any, color and were selling for a penny each. The first time his salesperson put a small postcard display on the counter of a drug store people were reaching over the salesperson's shoulder to see them. He was able to have the natural color postcards sell for a nickel, quite the premium. The business took off from there. And yes, the same sky was used on multiple postcards because the sky was not always a clear blue with nice white clouds when the picture was taken. The art department, which consisted of about 10 people, would crop the sky into the picture to make a more visually pleasing postcard.

This was so friggin' interesting! I did NOT anticipate sitting here, scratching my head, completely submerged in a subject most people would describe as "arbitrary"; Buuut here I am, completely and totally fascinated of this story about the sky in old postcards. I LOVE IT!

Amazing story. Just awesome! Wow.

absolutely love these kinds of videos

This was really good. What an interesting story.

Man, you definitely changed my mind about buying postcards the next time I travel.

This is so unbelievably fascinating! Thank you, Vox!

When I was in media class in high school, we made a post card. We had to get rid of grayscale in the sky and replace it with clouds. I feel like this is just pre-photoshop photoshop.

This is interesting. I love videos and stories like this.

James seems like such a fun and nice guy! The type of guy you would wanna go to a museum with!

This is absolutely lovely

So cool to see a postcard from my hometown of Prince George, British Columbia in the collection. Mr. PG is a classic!

Fascinating how so much around us is mostly out of focus for us. Focusing just a little bit into our surroundings could open a pandora's box.

This was great, thank you!

Wow---that was fascinating. I have a bunch of old postcards from when I was a young child--I'll have to go back and check out the skies.

Why is this so interesting? Seriously, I can't understand why I enjoyed this so much.

This is the best series on the internet.

A most interesting documentary. A fascinating discovery in what many would consider a mundane subject. Good work.

Cool story, always a joy to watch

This was such an interesting program. I too love post cards. What a great hobby😳

Love this so much!!!!!!!

brilliant content, as always! thank you!!!

I love how almost all those postcards look. They make me feel safe and relaxed. Might start collecting vintage postcards now :D

Haa that is just amazing, I love this channel X

Awesome, thank you for your video , made my day to see this.

This is content not found on most other channels and it’s largely why I keep coming back. It’s original, it’s interesting, it’s obscure, it’s whimsical... 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

I collect postcards from every place I visit. I love this-- the collection of skies all lined up. Personally in the era of digital editing I'm a huge fan of the worst the field has to offer, but it's incredible to see we've been doing baffling edits on mass-produced postcards ever since we could.

What an amazing collection

What we should be talking about is James’ Booker Little LP. This guy has great taste in music.

Loved this video❤️☁️

Fascinating stuff!

Another video I'd never find interesting but watched to the end.

The postcards become a genre with this ref to typology. I wish we'd have postcard exhibitions too. Brilliant work guys!

Always loved postcards for some reason ..so this was really interesting to watch :)

This was so interesting. Thank you for sharing! I would love for James to make an instagram where he shares one postcard a day. I love stories like his.

A video I never knew I needed

Very interesting history of postcards... 👌

Amazing story!

So interesting. Thanks Vox

To expand on a number of other commenters pointing out that the swap may be because the original photo's sky was just boring I think it's also worth noting the color reversal, or slide film like kodachrome is very unforgiving in its exposure latitude compared to negative film. Original images may have been shot to properly expose foregrounds but left the bright sky blown out and over exposed. If the perfect sky was hard to get an image of they may have just expected to correct it in post.

I love this series. I appreciate darkroom so much. It’s a totally unstressful, deeply informative series that makes me go “wow” every time. As a side note, I think that I found a new hobby lol.

Fun video! Lots of British Columbiana represented in those photos with Mr. PG standing out the most of course. I had to chuckle at that bland McLeod Lake postcard as one of the greatest photos I’ve ever taken in my life was from that very spot!!!

This really hits me. Somehow the little things you do, photos you took may seems uninteresting to others & only interesting to you. But somewhere in the future, there are people who might think that the things you do are fasinating

It is really great to think that any interesting things you make, either by mistake or intention, will have a fair chance of being discovered by somebody else, soon or later.

The more often you see something the more you like it, like the Mona Lisa, the same sky becomes recognizable and comforting

Fascinating! 🎉

It just looks beautifully aesthetic. That's all I guess. Really gives old time vibe.

Fascinating!