As it's SuperbOwl Sunday, I guess it's time to look again at this fascinating 'reverse' Owl Cigars sign from 1913 San Francisco:

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Black and white photo taken from an elevated position. It shows an urban setting with large buildings either side of a road that runs from the foreground to the background. Some of these buildings have advertisements painted on them, and the most prominent of these has white lettering out of a dark background that reads "Owl" (from Owl Cigars) but written in reverse.

As it's #SuperbOwl Sunday, I guess it's time to look again at this fascinating 'reverse' Owl Cigars sign from 1913 San Francisco:

ghostsigns.co.uk/2024/07/the-m

cc @superbowl

For even more San Francisco Owl Cigars photos, check out the detective work by @ihazrabies here:

sfghostsigns.com/blog/2024/6/1

#Ghostsigns #Owl #Cigars #SanFrancisco

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Second thought (Better idea): After seeing the second photo and thinking more of the timeframe these are taken… Photographs then were most likely daguerreotypes and tintypes. Which means their prints were in reverse, and they do not use negatives, like modern film photography, so flipping the photo right-side up was not a straight forward process

This is a neat idea, but it makes me wonder why there aren’t more examples if it was so useful for early photography. Or maybe there were, and we’ve just lost any record of them.

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