Archive for the ‘Frank Hardy Photography’ Category
Boy Blowing Bubbles in the Backseat …
Ok, Ok … I made a mistake on the last ” Boy Blowing Bubbles ” image and I did scan it backwards. I thought that it was sort of interesting that someone was driving an auto brought over from England since the steering wheel was located on the right side. However, after Rusty noticed it and said that the image was backward, I went back and rescanned it correctly and worked it up. I also did another negative that was in the envelope that I did not bother working up and posting earlier. The detail in the car’s body is more interesting than the bubbles that the boy is blowing, which do not really show up all that well. The car is parked on DeSoto Street in front of the offices on the side. My father’s first studio was located here before he moved across the street to 12th Avenue, so this was made in the late 1940’s. Next is another view straight on of the boy blowing bubbles and you see the north side of the old Sacred Heart Hospital in the background …
I do not know the make or model of the automobile, but it looks like it is brand new or it had just been washed and waxed. As mentioned in the earlier post, I have no idea who this boy is but some of you out there might recognize the boy. Thanks for looking and keeping me straight … if you ever notice a glaring mistake like I had made earlier, please let me know … Frank
W R Jones Used Cars …
The only thing that I am fairly sure of is that this car lot was on the corner of Garden and Pace Blvd ( and I am not even 100% sure of this being Pace and Garden ). At one time this corner was the location for Astro Lincoln-Mercury before they moved out to Car City on Highway 29 North. Here are several more views …
The old cars are interesting to see and also look at all of the oil stains in the road…one thing that I have noticed from all of these road photos that I have worked on over the last few years is how much oil you find on the streets. These cars back in the 1940’s and 50’s must have leaked oil like a sieve … I have often wondered if it could have been inferior gaskets made out of cork back in those days. Whatever the problem, it was something that needed to be fixed. Any comment about any of this is appreciated. I have several more posts ready to go and I will put them up next week. Thanks for looking and please check back … Frank
Concrete Supply Company …
I do not know anything about Concrete Supply Company, I ran across these the other day and thought that they looked interesting. It must have been a huge operation with all of the trucks that they operated. These photos were made on August 24, 1956, or that was the date on the negative envelope. The construction business in Pensacola must have been booming during this time for this company to maintain and operate so many trucks. Here are a few more photos …
I have no idea where this business was located, but it sure took up a lot of property somewhere in Pensacola. If you have any information regarding this business or the concrete business in general, please feel free to share it with us. Thanks for looking and please check back … Frank
Nurses At Sacred Heart Hospital In The 1940’s …
Staying in the 1940’s, I scanned some prints that my father had made at the old Sacred Heart Hospital. The three that I am posting are ones that I just scanned in the past several days … mostly because they did not require too much Photoshop work to get ready to put up on this site. This first one has always been interesting to me and for some reason or another I have just never gotten around to scan it. The next is a group of nurses on the steps out front of the hospital …
Note all of the ivy on the walls out front of the hospital and also notice the round globe lights … I do not think that I have seen these before, maybe I have but I just do not recall at the moment. The last one is of the nurses in the nursery with a newborn …
Notice the ” S C ” on the nurses pocket that stands for ” Sister’s of Charity “, the order that ran the hospital. I wish I had more information to share with you about these images, but maybe someone out there might recognize some of the nurses in these photos and know something to share with us. I will say that these images from the 1940’s and earlier are all prints that I scan … that accounts for the color of the images, which I think is interesting. I could take the color out in Photoshop, but for some reason I like the color and tone of the images. I will not necessarily that they have aged this color as much as I believe some where printed on a ” warm ” tone paper. The images that are more black and white might have been printed on a ” cold ” tone paper. Thanks for looking and if you know anything about any of these images, please feel free to comment. Thanks for looking … Frank
Nurses Out Front Of Sacred Heart Hospital 1940’s …
These two nurses are standing out front on the lawn of the old Sacred Heart Hospital …in the background to the left you see the base of the marble stairs. As usual, I have no clue who these young ladies are. I have had this photo lying around for years and have just never posted it for some unknown reason. If anyone has a clue who these nurses are, please feel free to share it with us. Thanks for looking and please check back … Frank
Clubbs Junior High School Cheerleaders 1956 …
I thought that I would post a couple of photos that I have been sitting on for years and just never got around to doing anything with them. I ran across the scans of the negatives just the other day and they were in good shape and they would not take a lot of Photoshop work to get them ready to post so here they are. As usual I have no clue who any of the girls are in the photo, but I have a good friend who’s sister went to Clubbs during this period and I know that she can identify a few of the girls in the photo if not all of them. I have more of this same group of cheerleaders that I will get ready and post later. How many of you out there can remember a good old Clubbs cheer? I wish that I could find some action sports shots, but all that I have run across are team photos. If anyone out there has any photos from the football, baseball or basketball games, let me know. I would be interested in scanning them to post on the blog. Also, any PHS sports teams in action would be something that I am interested in seeing. I found some basketball action photos against PHS and Escambia when Coach Beck was coach at PHS. I will find them and post them in the near future. One more thing, if anyone out there has any photos of the PHS teams in action let me know, especially the football teams of the 1950’s and 1960’s. My father went to every home game during those years and I know that he was on the side-lines making photos for the yearbook. If anyone out there has any of these old photos, pleas let me know because I would be interested in seeing them. Everything that he had from this era was lost in the fire of 1975. Here is one more of the cheerleaders …
Thanks again for looking and if anyone has any of the photos mentioned above, contact me through this blog. I have connected these blogs with Facebook in hopes of getting more viewers and it has helped somewhat in getting me some new readers. However, I rarely ever go and check my messages on Facebook. If you have a comment or want to send me a message, please do it through either one of my blogs. Thanks for looking and please let me hear from you … Frank
The Hardy Collection Negatives …
Several years ago, after I had culled through about eighty boxes or so of negatives that had been stored in a room off of my parent’s garage, I gave sixty boxes or so of negatives from the 1950’s and 60’s to what was then called The Pensacola Historical Society. They in turn went through all of them and put them in new glassine sleeves and envelopes. Personally, I can not believe all of the time that was spent on preserving all of these negatives. You are looking at five rows with around twelve legal sized boxes per row. These are from the 1950’s to the early 1960’s … maybe 1962. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I did not have a photo of all of the negatives cataloged by year. I personally want to thank Jacquelyn Wilson for all of the time and effort she spent on undertaking this huge project … you are looking at easily over 100,000 negatives / images and this is just from twelve years or so. If anyone has any questions about any of these negatives, feel free to contact the Historic Trust ( their new name since they are now part of The University of West Florida ) in downtown Pensacola with any of your questions… 850-595-5840. They also have lots of archived images that you can look through and purchase for your own personal use. Sure is a lot more personal way to decorate your home, your office or whatever area you have that you want to decorate. I still have thousands of negatives and those are what I have selected to put here on this blog. You can also contact me and I can share with you what little I know … Thanks again for looking and please check back … Frank
Another Re-Worked Photo From The Past …
One more old Kodachrome image that I had scanned and put an over-lay texture over the image to give it more of an aged effect. I also like the texture that is created on the image, but some of this is lost when I re-size and reduce an image for the web. I wrote a post on my blog earlier today reminding my few readers that I also have this blog and to come over and check out the work that I have posted. I get ten times as many viewers on this blog as I do on my personal blog, but I just wanted to make my viewers aware of all that I have posted on this site. I have several things that I am working on for this site and one is adding a textured over-lay to some of the images that I thought might benefit from it. The other I will share with you later when I get some images completed.
The next two things are a couple of web sites that I recently just ran across … the first shows you a list of old images and the background is Google Maps and you over-lay the image over it. Here is a link to the site. Type in ” Pensacola Florida ” and go to downtown Pensacola, find the corner of Palafox and Main Street where the new Artisan Apartment building is being built and find the old photo of Pensacola Restaurant Supply and lay it over the corner to see what it looked like back in the 1970’s … pretty neat effect if you ask me. There is a list of of old buildings that you can do this to. I uploaded one of my old Sacred Heart Hospital image with the nuns out front, but it said that there was no Google street-level view for the block between DeSoto and Brainerd Streets, which I knew was wrong. Maybe I did something wrong, but go check it out. The other site is The Florida Past project and a link is here. I have not gone all through it but what little I did see was interesting. Contact me with any comments or questions and let me hear from you … Thanks for looking … Frank
PS – I title all of my images, for what it is worth, and the one above is ” Road To No Where ” or maybe it is ” Lonesome Road To No Where ” or it could be ” On The Road With The Drifting Cowboys “. Take your pick … not a car or a person in site. How many of you can remember that canvas water bag that traveler’s used to hang off of their radiator for when your car over-heated in the desert? And how about driving across the desert at night since it was too hot during the day? I can remember sitting in the back seat of this old Buick by myself with the window rolled down, staring out the window looking out at the stars when all of a sudden a UFO comes flying by … I can see them like it was yesterday … at least I thought it was a UFO and I was too young back then to even know what a UFO was back then. More on that later … Thanks for stopping by …
Re-Worked Images …
No … I have not been in jail … or the hospital … or have I died …. I have just been busy with other things over the past few weeks and have not been posting any images recently. One thing that I have been working on lately is re-working some of my images and putting a textured overlay on them. I am surprised at how much you can change the look and feel of an image by just adding some texture in Photoshop. The ” old-school ” way was to do it in printing on textured paper, but you were also very limited by the few printing papers that you could select or by running the finished print through a texture-creating machine. I have been doing some reading and found a technique that I that would be interesting and am starting to create some new images from old images. The image above of Pensacola Bay around 1950 is an image that I thought would lend itself well to texturing and I think that it succeeded. Also, a gift to my viewers, this image is an 8×10 full resolution sized file. So if you want to down-load the file ( right click and Save as … ) you can make a print to keep. Just call it an early Christmas gift. Most of all of the other images on this blog are sized for the web for easy loading and viewing … nothing bothers me more than having to wait minutes for images to load because the photographer was not considerate enough to resize the image or images. As usual, all comments are appreciated and welcomed. Please check back, because I forgot to mention that I have been doing some scanning a lot of new negatives. Thanks and please check back … Frank
Clubbs Junior High School …
The date ( I believe ) is 1956. Back then, schools used to put on these elaborate coronations and would crown a king and queen of the school. Clubbs Junior High School on 12th Avenue used to have a ” King and Queen of Clubbs ” and would also have a court. I would assume it was pretty much a popularity contest … the athletes and cheerleaders would make up half of court usually. I did not know this until I talked to a friend of mine whose sister just happened to have been elected the ” Queen of Clubbs ” a year or two after this coronation. By the time I was in junior high school in the mid-1960’s, these coronations were a thing of the past. At least they were at Wokman Junior High where I went. This event was held in the auditorium at Clubbs. By the time my friend’s sister was queen it had gotten so large, it was moved to the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Pensacola. I have several bags full of negatives that I will go through and post in the future. Here is the other view that I worked up …
This one still needs some more work, but it is passable for the internet / blog. It is not as sharp as I would like it to be. I do not remember what years the other years are and I will find the bags and look. If anyone out there happened to be in the audience at this year’s coronation, please share what you remember with us. Thanks for looking and please check back … Frank
Frank Hardy Made My Photographs Two 
You must be logged in to post a comment.