Blast From The Past- Oil painted photos of the past.  

Well, I'm helping my wife with her blast from the past again and I must say I'm actually enjoying doing this. My wife was posting a photo of herself for her "blast of the past" item and it was a "colored" photo. She thought it was just done on color film so I had to explain to her the difference. Back in the late 50's and early 60's color film was still in it's infancy. Most pictures taken with color film often faded very quickly-sometimes in as little as a couple of years. For this reason many photographers and labs would offer "hand-colored" black and white photos for weddings or school pictures that were considered to last a lifetime. Color prints made on color photo paper is for the most part still quite unstable and photos I have done just a few years ago are now fading (and I processed them myself washing the fixer out of some of them for an hour or more). While you can still buy paints for hand-coloring it is rare to find a photo shop or photographer who will do this. It has truly become a lost art.

Here is my blast from the past "hand-colored" photo taken during my graduation year. You can tell it is hand colored by the colors overlapping in the border area (of course you can tell when it is shown at full size too by clicking on the photo).