Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1245-1248)

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.

This appears to be a continuation of a set of photos that was taken in Arkansas in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The location was identified because some of the photos were taken near a Confederate grave and I was able to track down the name. The second photo here has a vehicle in it that might be able to narrow down the date a little further. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help much in this case. The vehicle is a Dodge Caravan (or similar...there were Plymouth and Chrysler models of essentially the same vehicle) of a style that was manufactured between 1983 and 1990. It appears to be in excellent condition except for the mud so it was probably pretty new when this picture was taken. I can't tell from this photo which model year it is though. If it could be definitively determined to be a Grand Caravan vs. a Caravan then the range shifts to 1987-1990 which is narrower. Maybe someone else can tell but I can't from this photo.

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