Rick Denney: WWI in color photos! (I, not II!!!)

[Chuck(G)]

The moment I went to the web page and saw the "confetti" in the sky shots, I knew exactly what these things were--I recall a description of the Lumiere brothers' process from a (by now anyway) old text on color photography.

What surprised me was how well these photos have survived. Compare the color quality in these with 50 year old Kodachromes with their faded organic dyes.

A real treat.

[Captain Sousie]

I am truly amazed. Thanks for sharing.

Dave

[Dylan King]

Those pictures are fantastic. My great grandpa Joe was a verterinarian in WWI and won a medal for sneaking over enemy lines and stealing a large box of chocolates, which helped keep his division from starving. He was an amazing individual. He trapped furs in Nebraska until he was 92 and wrecked his jeep in the middle on nowhere. He broke both his feet in the accident and was able to crawl three miles to the nearest residence for help. He died of a stroke in 1985 at the age of 96.
His oldest brother was the notorious Diamond Jim Brady.

Here is the only war picture I have of Grandpa Joe, standing on a beach in Europe. He is pictured on the right.



This is me at age 5 with Grandpa Joe in Gordon Nebraska.

[Dylan King]

I recently attended my Great Grandmother's funeral in Nebraska. She was 99 and 3/4. I met all of my cousins there. And there are a lot of them. Joe had 4 children, 21 grandchildren, 62 great grandchildren (I am the oldest boy), and now 8 great great grandchildren and counting. He was the youngest of 13 and my great grandma Joy was one out of 15 children.

Sometimes people in this country forget the great sacrifices for freedom our American brothers have paid. I will never forget the great blessings we have been given in the United States of America and the God who has blessed this great nation we call home.

[Rick Denney]

What surprised me was how well these photos have survived. Compare the color quality in these with 50 year old Kodachromes with their faded organic dyes.

Have Kodachromes faded? The ones I've seen haven't (as well as the ones I made as far back as the early 70's), and I always thought Kodachrome was an archival process. Kodachrome is a color positive (i.e., color slide) process invented way back in the 30's. What has faded is Kodacolor, a negative process. None of the color negatives are truly archival, but the early ones from the 50's were really bad. And the E-4 and E-6 color slide processes also fade (starting with Ektachrome and now all color slide films use this process). A whole generation of photographs is slipping away as a result.

I just finished digitizing one of my wife's old family photo albums, so we could identify the people in them before those who knew leave us, and so we could preserve them in some form. I'll probably have Fuji Crystal Archive prints made of them, though even those will fade in time.

The only archival color print process that I know of is the dye transfer process, which faded from use when Ciba-Geigy came out with the almost archival Cibachrome print process (now called Ilfochrome). The great photographer Eliot Porter used dye transfer extensively. And the Cibachrome prints I made in the 70's still look fresh. But now I'm going to read about the link that Wade has provided.

Rick "who was a Cibachrome early adopter" Denney

[Rick Denney]

Here's the link:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/thread?f ... 1088370788

Thanks for the link. I'm going to pass it along to the members of my Russian camera club.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This process used materials sensitive to light only (i.e., black and white) behind a filter made of very tiny colored spots. During processing (dont with conventional black-and-white chemistry), the colored starch grains stain the emulsion grains the same color as they allowed to pass during exposure, which makes the color positive. I'm greatly surprised they have not been attacked by fungus and other critters that would feed on starches; they must have been vary carefully preserved.

Since that time, color materials have been built in layers of emulsions, each of which is sensitive to a particular color and when processed become that color. But modern digital cameras are even more like the Autocolor process. They use plain light-sensitive sensors behind a color separation screen, and use software to color each sensor site appropriately.

But what I appreciated seeing even more was the old-world look of the photos. Notice how even in bright daylight, photos focused at a distance of 12 feet or so don't have enough depth of field to render the background sharp. This is a combination of very large format and very slow emulsions, requiring a lens with a wide aperture. When you consider that shutters with an open time of shorter than about 1/100 of a second were not available in WWI, the film speed must be incredibly slow to allow such a wide aperture. Most modern films could not be exposed in daylight with such narrow depth of field--they would be overexposed by the wide aperture. That alone confirms the age of the pictures. Photographers today try to get the same effect by using 8x10" film and thick netral-density filters to open up the aperture.

And the texture of the out-of-focus highlights is also characteristic of old glass. Today, lenses are made to be sharp across the film plane even at wide apertures, and even fixed-focal-length normal lenses have 6-8 elements to correct all the various faults. The lenses of the day would have had three elements, unless they were truly the very best available, which was the four-element Zeiss Tessar. These lenses are undercorrected for spherical aberration behind the focal plane, which makes out-of-focus backgrounds look like puffs of smoke instead of tangled edges. That old-world look is one thing I like about my Soviet-sphere lenses--they were designed using formulas developed in the 30's and before (taken from Zeiss after WWII as war reparations), but refined to modern standards of contrast and color.

Fascinating images; thanks for sharing them.

Rick "thinking Tournassoud should be as well-known for these images as Brady, but isn't" Denney

[Chuck(G)]

Rick, you're makng me feel old.

While Kodachrome's dyes are signifcantly more stable than Kodacolor or Ektachrome, there sill is a fade-out of red dyes over time, exacerbated by exposure to light. Oddly, the reverse is true for Ektachromes--the dyes degrade more rapidly in darkness.

Can one even get Kodachrome processed today? The process is very involved and entails a fair number of reagents on the hazmat list.

From my youth, I remember seeing a demonstration of making color separation prints. What a nightmare! My old Kodak darkroom chemistry book had lots of formulas for dyeing prints--if you used uranium salts, you got yellow; ferrocyanide for blue, etc.

I've used one of the old 8x10 view cameras from the WWI era, fitted with a modern film carrier. Lenses were usually simple 2-element rectilinear style, about f/8 tops; shutters were usually a 2-bladed pneumatically operated affair, either by squeeze bulb or by finger trigger. And a hat for the photographer was a necessity for outdoor shotis--with the old uncoated lenses, you could make a mess of a shot if the sun hit your lens. And emulsions were glacially slow--but then, I've used ASA 8 (that was daylight; wasn't it 4 or something for tungsten?) Kodachrome, too.

Chuck "who knows what 2-amino-5 diethylamine hydrochloride is good for" (G)