Lucas Rijnders wrote:
Op Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:06:00 +0100 schreef mike wilson
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
One other thing I notice: Old prints (say, beginning 20th century)
often
do not have a full tonal range: There's black and dark grey, and a
lot of
white. The middle to light grays seem to have bleached away. I
think this
is an ageing effect. You could mimick that to make photo's look 'old
and
worn'.
Not only an ageing effect. It was quite some time after the
development of easy access photography before film was developed
that reacted equally to all wavelengths of light. Part of the
pleasure of interpreting old photographs is working out what is
missing.
The prints I was thinking of are of ships on a sunny day on a river,
and all the blue (sky, river, say 90% of the frame :o) is almost
white. I think that makes sense, or should it be just the other way
around?
It is a pity, though. The ship belonged to my wife's grantparents, and
her family would appreciate 'better' copies. The prints are tiny. I
tried to scan, clean up and enlarge them, but I think there's just
too little information to work with... Even blowing up 'as-is' did
not yield useable results.
Along these lines: we strongly believe a dutch museum has 'glass
negatives' of the ship. Would that be worth pursueing? Can these
negatives still be printed (or scanned)? What size would a 'glass
negative' have? As they probably aren't "easy access photography":
would these negatives have the same tonality problems?
Thanks in advance,
Orthochromatic film and plates was particularly sensitive to blue, and
not sensitive to red, so to get detail in anythng that was green/red you
had to massively overexpose the blue. B&W paper is orthochromatic, and
ortho film is still available.
-Adam
