Noland's Photo Collection


Noland Adams Signing His Corvette Restoration Books circa late 1970s
1956 Corvettes in San Francisco


The Digital Photo Collection

Noland Adams owns a fantastic photo collection. Only GM has a better collection. GM provided Noland with unique access to GM's photographic library, and basically told Noland to do whatever he wanted to do with the photos. GM knew that Noland was publishing a book for Automobile Quarterly about Corvette Restoration, and wanted to help with the effort. Thus, GM gave Noland unfettered access to and use of whatever Noland wanted to take or copy. Thus, Noland's photo collection is basically free of any copyright restriction, making this website both possible and unique.

The collection contains scans of roughly 20,000 GM and personal photos and negatives.

Here are 42 of My Favorite Photos.




The Hubble Telescope Effect

Do you ever wish Noland had inserted pictures showing more detail in his books? Noland actually wanted to use larger pictures in his book. But the idea just was not workable given the number of pictures and amount of text in Noland's two restoration guides. The idea is workable now however. Take a look at the two pics below, where I compare a pic from Noland's book to the same pic now on Noland's hard drive. Stunning difference. The amount of detail in Noland's pic is amazing - many of Noland's pics are either 8x10s or GM 4x5 negatives. To preserve the quality of Noland's pics, I scanned many of the negatives in at 9000x9000 dpi, with the uncompressed files (tiff) exceeding 150MB or more per picture.


Take a close look at what is on the table, and the frame on the passenger side kick up. Hard to see much, right?

From this pic, you can see that the frame has "289" written on it, and the car behind it is "290". You can also see that, contrary to conventional wisdom, GM was still handing out the temporary owner's manuals and using the thicker version of the wiper jar holder late in the 1953 run. You can also see the paper bag that GM placed in the car containing some screws for the license plate.







Russ Uzes - Webmaster
Mill Valley CA
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