Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1313-1316)

in photography •  2 years ago 

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

All of the photos in this set are unlabeled and undated but I would guess are from the late 1950s or early 1960s. Except the 2nd photo leads me to believe late 1960s is more likely. All of these are versions of the images processed with color correction and Digital ICE. Without that they consisted of barely discernible shades of red.

The first photo appears to be a shot of some older gentlemen standing outside a tent, perhaps on a hunting trip?



The second features an airplane and presumably its soon to be (or recent) occupants. The registration number is clearly visible giving me something to search for as there are a multitude of websites with info on aircraft registrations, including the FAA itself. However, registration numbers get reused over time. There are two planes with this particular registration (N2569V). The second is far too new but the first looks like a possibility. It belongs to a Cessna 170 that was registered in 1968. However, it looks like this plane was built much earlier than that. The serial number is 18110 which, doing a little research on this model, indicates that this plane was produced in the first year of manufacture for the Cessna 170 in 1948. I couldn't find anything on the first 20 years of that aircraft's history or what ultimately happened to it, except that the registration was cancelled a few years later in 1971.




registration info



Cessna 170 serial numbers



Assuming Google Maps has not led me astray, the person who registered this plane in 1968 lived in this house

The third photo shows a woman holding a boy. Possibly grandmother and grandson?:



I'm not sure what the subject of this photo is supposed to be but there appears to be a pond and ducks in the background:




The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.

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