I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.
The photos are definitely taken at very different times: #23 has flowers in the grass that remind me of summer. #27 has bare trees that say winter or late fall/early spring (and the lack of leaves or snow on the ground snow and relatively light garments of the soldier(?) makes me think early spring). Same for #48 and #55. #44 has parasols, indicating summer.
From what I see it's probably not winter (lack of snow), not autumn (lack of leaves on the ground). But that still leaves a pretty long time period with a bigger range of temperatures.
The vibrant leaves that you can see on trees in many of the pictures usually appear in mid-May and last until October, so that narrows it down in terms of temperature. Likely 15-25 C.
Depends on what you mean by 'short'. I think you're probably thinking of much further north in Norway. Summers in Oslo are usually from May or June to August. Sometimes there's 20+ C in March, sometimes it's 5 C in May. Night frost usually sets in around late October/early November, with snow usually arriving in November or December. Snow is usually gone by or during March.
Apparently the average temperature in 1890 was 1.3 C colder than it is now.
Well, that's fairly short by U.S. standards, at least when counting 20+ C weather, which in many states is nearly 6 months of the year, with summer heat lasting well through September in many places.
Even places south of Norway, like Netherlands, still considered pretty far north for many in the world, have relatively 'short' summers as well.
Ah, in that case then we have short summers. To me, "short summers" is the month or so of mosquito hell between spring and fall that they have in the northernmost parts of Norway.
It’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0].
In fact that's the only interesting photos from old albums (that and people you know). A 100,000th photo from the Eiffel tower will be the least interesting thing you will find (unless it happens to be a landmark that disappeared). But life in the street of Paris in the 60s is really interesting and amusing to contrast to today.
I really hate these types of videos that ruin a perfectly good video and fill it with AI-generated fake frames and colors. Colorization especially is not something that an AI can do well yet. It generally turns it into a rainbowy mess of constantly shifting colors.
Also even the framerate is often wrong as these old movies didn't have consistent framerates. They were hand cranked so the framerate varied quite a bit.
During the 1800s there were four sets of building regulations (or rather, laws) for Christiania (the name of Oslo back then), which regulated everything from the width of the streets to how many floors buildings could be. In 1827 the minimum street width became 11.35m, then 12.60 in 1842, 15.75 in 1875 and 20m in 1899. (https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murbyen_(Oslo) has a good overview).
The background for the regulation was the switch from unregulated wood buildings to requiring mainly brick as building material - there were some major fires before using bricks became the law.
I live just around the corner from one of the photos - the building in that photo hasn't changed much since back then.
The actual noise levels may have been higher. Regardless, I think the main reason is ventilation. With coal and wood heating streets were designed to act as valleys pushing air through. Also, I hard that old European cities were built with airflow in mind. Whole streets were uninterrupted with trees while some have them.
Also I heard an opinion that Wrocław is one of the most polluted cities because it got a lot of new buildings that break the airflow on main streets.
Delivery wagons might be drawn with a team of two or even four horses (or even bullocks). You'd want to be able to turn them around in such streets. Certainly that was the case for Australian country town main streets laid down in the 1800s
What confuses me: These are good photos! Many are sharp, well lit. And they were made from a pocket camera of people who didn't specifically stand still for the photo.
Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.
You will notice that most of the photopgraphs have been made in direct sunlight. So he could have used high aperture and short shutter time. Most likely it was a fixed-aperture and shutter setup, since he could hardly have adjusted anything while shooting covertly. Still, not all of the photos are sharp, some do have motion blur, and some have grain, perhaps from pushing during development (i.e. correcting slightly underexposed shots).
But the technical basis was definitely on top of the game at the time, under the given conditions.
The first photograph successfully fixed to a substrate was in the 1820s, and the commercially viable daguerreotype came in the 1830s, so photography had been around a while in the 1890s.
If you flip this around a bit... why would people think to smile for photographs? They're not looking dour, they're just sitting for a photo with their natural faces. Their main points of reference were drawn or painted portraits that people also didn't smile for (partially due to the amount of time you'd need to pose).
Smiling for photographs is a social behavior that took time to catch on.
Tintype is a different technology. By the 1890s, it would have been as obsolete as rotary landline phones are today.
I think the reason is different, because even I, as a kid in the early 1980s, was taken to a photo shop for "official shots", well dressed and told to behave. It was a bit unnatural, yes. People in staged shots are generally a little stiff.
Of course a tintype is a different technology from fast film or plates, or whatever this photographer was using.
However, you're incorrect about the lack of usage in the timeframe specified: "Tintypes enjoyed their widest use during the 1860s and 1870s, but lesser use of the medium persisted into the early 20th century" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype
Besides, the GP comment referred to the era, to which I was responding.
Your explanation is not without merit, however: "One common explanation for the lack of smiles in old photos is that long exposure times — the time a camera needs to take a picture — made it important for the subject of a picture to stay as still as possible. That way, the picture wouldn't look blurry." — https://www.vox.com/2015/4/8/8365997/smile-old-photographs
Photographic technology developed rapidly between the heyday of tintype (1870s'ish) and when these pictures were made (1890s). See my other reply for some readings to learn more about late 19th century photography.
(Also, photography was invented in the 19th century. I'm not sure why you make such sweeping claims about a whole century when exposures went from taking hours to fractions of a second over the course of it.)
I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.