September 1886 - No. 465 "COOGEE BAY, SYDNEY", New South Wales, Australia (cropped & restored version)

IMAGE INFO

- The viewpoint for this historic & rare image is looking south-south-west from the northern end of Coogee Beach.

- The "bathing machines" shown here were invented & produced by Mr Harry Greenfield from about March 1885 at the Vial & Sons coach factory, Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Though similar to others already in use in England & Europe, Mr Greenfield added an ingenious shark-proof cage mechanism that bathers could keep within, if they felt it necessary.

- The machines shown here would likely have first appeared at Coogee Beach sometime during September 1886, since Randwick Council gave approval for their immediate use on Coogee Beach on 31 August 1886. Not all councillors were in favor!

- The image is therefore dated September 1886.

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SOURCE INFO

- Photographer is Henry King.

- The original silver gelatin dry plate glass negative (full plate) was digitized by the Museum of Applied Arts & Science & is available from the M.A.A.S. online collection here:

collection.maas.museum/object/31068#&gid=1&pid=1

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CREDITS

- Henry King (photographer)

- Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (aka Powerhouse Museum) New South Wales for their valuable work in digitizing, archiving & making available online this rare historical content.

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COPYRIGHT STATUS

- The original image is no longer restricted by commercial Copyright, per advice -

"Out of Copyright

Reason for copyright status: Created/Published Date is Before 1955

Material type: Photograph

Government copyright ownership: No Government Copyright Ownership".

- As for my own work in creating this unique cropped & restored sepia duo-tone version, I have applied a Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivative" Copyright.

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PROCESS INFO

- I downloaded a copy of the digitized original (large file size & very faded, with a lot of cracked emulsion damage).

- Using Adobe Photoshop CS Windows, I cropped out the worst blurred & damaged top & side sections, enlarged the resulting image, then repaired much of the remaining image, removing thousands of cracked emulsion artifacts, restoring contrast, sharpness & lastly applying an adjusted sepia duo-tone curve for much better dynamic range.

- I resisted attempting to remove the remaining thousands of cracking artifacts from the sand areas & some of the water areas, since they only become a bit annoying at full zoom (my mouse recorder tells me I had made over 25,000 clicks, 10,000 zoom scrolls clicks & covered 1 km already to get the image to this stage, so I wasn't about to expend that much again for a "more perfect" result!)

Done