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Jan. 14th, 2012 12:05 am.
I made a new Flickr set of some sections of maps from a fairly complete set (I've never checked to be sure, but whenever I wanted a state to be there, it was) of 1940 gas station maps of the US, Canada, and Mexico. (Clicking on an image will take you to the flickr set.)
They are large. Just imagine trying to drive while looking at one. The New York map took eleven scans to cover the whole thing, and once I had all the pieces, they wouldn't let themselves be composited. They wouldn't line up – things changed size. I don't know how to explain, but I worked and worked at it and finally gave it up. I did persist long enough to stitch two sections together to cover the area I'm in.
The original scans are rather large — 15MB, 20MB, some even more — but I wanted to make desktops from them for myself and some friends and relations, so I would enlarge and reduce in Photoshop until I had an optimal looking area and then I made screen shots. They're much more tractable, filesizewise. The largest available size should be suitable for a desktop image.
Today I had the novel idea of sharing them with the invisible audience in Flickrland (and LJ Land). They're a window into a slightly less developed time with slower speed limits and more unpaved roads. They have a lot of town names that have been subsumed into cities (or in the case of Stout, Colorado, flooded by a reservoir). I hope you'll enjoy them.
.
I made a new Flickr set of some sections of maps from a fairly complete set (I've never checked to be sure, but whenever I wanted a state to be there, it was) of 1940 gas station maps of the US, Canada, and Mexico. (Clicking on an image will take you to the flickr set.)
They are large. Just imagine trying to drive while looking at one. The New York map took eleven scans to cover the whole thing, and once I had all the pieces, they wouldn't let themselves be composited. They wouldn't line up – things changed size. I don't know how to explain, but I worked and worked at it and finally gave it up. I did persist long enough to stitch two sections together to cover the area I'm in.
The original scans are rather large — 15MB, 20MB, some even more — but I wanted to make desktops from them for myself and some friends and relations, so I would enlarge and reduce in Photoshop until I had an optimal looking area and then I made screen shots. They're much more tractable, filesizewise. The largest available size should be suitable for a desktop image.
Today I had the novel idea of sharing them with the invisible audience in Flickrland (and LJ Land). They're a window into a slightly less developed time with slower speed limits and more unpaved roads. They have a lot of town names that have been subsumed into cities (or in the case of Stout, Colorado, flooded by a reservoir). I hope you'll enjoy them.
.
