The Town of Taal, Batangas c. 1903

The town of Taal, circa 1903.  Image source:  Official Handbook of the Philippines and Catalogue of the Philippine Exhibit.

The photograph above was taken from the public domain book “Official Handbook of the Philippines and Catalogue of the Philippine Exhibit” which was published in 1904 by the Philippine Exposition Board under the authority of the Civil Governor of the Philippine Islands. The publication was printed for use in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri. It is a rich source of textual and photographic information about the Philippines early in the American colonial era. The photograph was simply captioned “Taal, Batangas, Philippines.”

As tends to happen when scans are made on books, the end result tends to be somewhat grainy as evidenced by the picture above. It has been processed using graphics editing software to improve quality, but software can only do so much if the original photograph is not of the highest quality in the first place. The picture above has been colorized courtesy of Algorithmia.

Below is the original black and white version taken from the book.

The original gray scale version of the top photograph.

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