Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, 1940
Turns out there's some color home video of the 1940 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from which this photo is taken.
The New York Daily News has a nice balloon retrospective slide show.
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Oh, that was neat!! And no silly commentary or ads! I loved it!!
Amazing "Truth,Justice and the American Way" !
These gop/teabaggers Do Not Know of this statement ! "Those people" Only Know, "Hate,LIES,Injustice,Inequality and the UN-American Way" ! GOMERS , They Are !
Greatness!
For Will and everyone too young to understand, that was film, not video. Specifically, Kodachrome, the color film having optimum life expectancy in storage under any reasonable conditions. After a 75-year production run, it was, sadly, discontinued in 2009. The ephemeral nature of today's digital images, whether still or motion, will leave a large gap in the photo history of our times.
Kodachrome didn't require an ongoing program of file backups and copying as digital media deteriorate and/or are obsoleted by new formats and a lack of devices to read the old ones. Just shoot the film, have it processed and store it in a can. Always available to review just by looking at it with human eyes. :-)
The person who shot that Macy's parade film from a window was obviously an amateur with no more cinematic skills than the typical iPhone user. Done properly, 16mm Kodachrome was a joy to behold.
Fortunately, an image recording medium with the longest life expectancy of any -- more than five times Kodachrome's 100 years -- is still in wide production and readily available. Black and white film images may be the only durable record of our lives today. I'm happy to continue using it and contributing to history's archive.
Pedantic, elitist and condescending. Well done.
You're entitled to your opinion, but there are lots of young people, likely including many who read this blog, who don't know about or appreciate film. What's worse, a significant percentage of those who do know about it think it's "dead," i.e. no longer available. I'll happily suffer your epithets if my comment makes one or more of them aware that chemical imaging remains viable, commercially manufactured and offered for sale. :-)
Sal
You're post reminds me of how amazing the special called "Dust Bowl" was this week with the films they had from that period of history. My grandparents were farms then in Baca County that was highlighted in the film. I had never seen anything but still pictures of that family history. It is sad that film is gone-it was a wonderful medium for a long time. Interestingly when running high speed strobe shots in commercials (producing slow motion images) they use film or at least they used to just a few years ago.
Hi network-gal,
Thank you for providing such a wonderful example that illustrates the point I was making. Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl" included not only motion picture segments, but many, many still images as well. As an aside, I was thrilled that this time he panned/zoomed very little with the stills. In any case, those large-format black and white photographs were magnificently served by the HD video.
You are correct that film is "gone," but only for commercial applications. Black and white still photography (even some color, for now) continues to be practiced using easily obtained film, paper and chemistry. I still do all my personal work using view cameras of various sizes and rely on Ilford for materials. People who haven't before seen the tonality and sharpness such prints exhibit are awestruck when they do, especially if their only frame of reference is electronic images on lcd screens.
The crux of my post was that, 80 years from now, when all these ones and zeros have disintegrated or become unreadable due to technology obsolescence, there won't be any visual material for Ken Burns' great grandson or granddaughter to use in documenting life of our current era. Unless some people both recognize that film is still alive and start using it.
By the way, I'm not a technophobe. I recently retired after a career in electrical engineering. Photography is a hobby only for me. I have no vested interest in film/paper manufacturing, distribution or retailing.
My dad the engineer was a hobbiest too. I remember dad making our personal Christmas cards in the bathtub before color!
That should have scared Hitler into slowing down in itself! Look at all that rubber they're using and in the middle of depression as well, but maybe he just wanted to own it himself.
Where's the Giant Stay-Puffed marshmallow man when you need him?
I think, after all these years, why I should need a Balloon payment on my loans. I now understand. When you are taken for a ride, of course it needs a parade!
Ms. Maddow, you are an exceptionally beautiful woman with an exceptionally beautiful mind. Please keep trying to educate an ignorant public.
At the risk of redundancy spiraling through the maze of acceptance to arrive here:
Mz. Maddow, I find you to be one of (if not the) most intelligent persons that currently attempt to discover intelligence in this world of Media overload. The sound you do not hear is my applause. Please keep on (keeping on).
As my Captain(a burn out from N am) use to say "That's just super..." I hated that nut until I got to know him and his history.
Is it just me, or does that Superman head kind of look like Mario Cuomo, circa 1988?