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My Dad was out in the Northwest Frontier in WWI doing plate photography! I have just a few surviving images that were transferred to photographic paper as the hundreds of plates he had were all destroyed when my parents were bombed out, twice, during the Blitz in WWII. How did he bring back hundreds of plates from the NW Frontier, and how did he even go about doing plate photography out there since he lived on horseback (17th-21st Lancers)? Unfortunately I will never know.
But today was a bit of a revelation for me. I gave one of my Dad’s images of a Massoud (that’s the tribe they were fighting out in Afghanistan) to ChatGPT and asked it to clean up and colourise it, which it did brilliantly. I then asked Grok to animate it and I was floored by the result, which actually includes a soundtrack.
Unfortunately the uploaded MP4 plays fine as an attachment – but doesn’t seem to work when you click on the above link. Highly annoying, sorry about that.
