Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

> This meant toting hundreds of pounds of equipment — including volatile chemicals, a darkroom tent and fragile glass plates — to wherever they hoped to snap a scene.

I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was eventually handed over to me.

That started my obsession with collecting all the family photos I could find. And starting with that suitcase, I scanned every photo and embarked on cleaning up and adjusting levels (etc.) for every interesting photo in the lot.

Sometimes a few lines of text on the back or border gave me the date or subject of the photo. Often there was nothing though. Nonetheless, I was slowly able to recognize people in the photos, associate a name to them (from also doing traditional genealogy with Ancestry.com). Stories emerged in some cases (my great grandmother's big road-trip vacation in 1925 after the divorce from her unfaithful husband, the mysterious young woman in the Denver photos that I was eventually able to trace to a teen daughter who died in Mexico, Missouri while away at music school, etc.)

And as I was able to figure out the photos, order them, I got to also see the progress of photography and cameras. The tintype and early collodion photos were all in a studio setting (perhaps a single photography studio in Kansas City in 1880? She was only a young girl, her father a farmer — he must have been putting on airs to have a studio photograph taken of his young daughter).

And then the Kodak Brownie (I assume) makes the scene by 1920 or so for the family and photos start to appear taken in the field, on the farm — no longer in studios. The quality though suffers immensely.

Better Kodaks (or similar) come into the family by the 30's and candid, amatuer photography now rivals the quality of the earlier studio photos. Somewhat.

Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos. So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.

> So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital.

Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.

Maybe someone else knows why black and white film looks sharper and has more detail then. Was there a race to the bottom in terms of optics when color film showed up in the consumer camera? Is it because they moved to a smaller film stock than the medium format 120 film that was common in B&W cameras before color? Or is color film, with three layers of gelatin, an inherently "noisier" film stock?

I don't know. I only observe the quality fall off when color arrives. Worse, I am not even sure. that my mom's 35mm camera (Canon AE-1) in the 70's shot as good and crisp photos as the B&W cameras in the family in the 40's (before she was born though).

There’s multiple things going on.

The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image.

And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

No one has ever looked at a photograph and wept because it was so sharp...

...of course many photographers have wept because a photograph wasn't sharp.

There have been millions of photos that have suffered at the hands of the sharpness slider.

In fairness, that's not the photo that was too sharp, but an unsharp mask that was applied too heavily. ;)

Using sharpness never improves a photograph, only changes it.

> And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

Maybe perceptually - due to stronger contrast and perhaps also the fact that B&W film often comes in higher speeds and probably incurs less motion blur of the subject overall.

But I don't think it's actually objectively sharper per se?

In terms of grain I think the finest is still bw film. Highest exposure latitude as well. Great dynamic range as well probably still better than digital.

Your square color photos are almost certainly made from medium format film!

The most common frame size used in 120 is a 6x6cm square, especially in consumer cameras of the time. 6x6 cameras stayed popular for snapshots because they could be contact printed straight from the negative, without an enlarger. A whole roll of 120 can be contact printed onto a single sheet of paper and then cut. Much cheaper and faster than enlarging 35mm negatives.

With film there’s no such thing as a b&w specific camera. The difference you’re seeing is probably down to the glass in whatever cheap & cheerful 6x6 rangefinder they took those 1950s family snaps on, vs the photos from the AE-1 which is an all time great camera & lens system.

Black and white film retains the developed silver particles, whereas color processing discards the silver entirely and leaves clouds of dye behind to form the image. The silver has higher acutance, of course.

The ae1 was fine unless there was some junk lens from a department store on the end of it. Canon lens would have been fine. It is true color film however is usually of lower apparent quality than black and white films. A lot of people would buy consumer films that are worse than pro films (true for today as well, compare portra 160 to gold and theres noticable difference in grain size and overall fidelity). Printing was also bad. You could probably make higher quality scans or prints today if you had access to the negatives.

Slide film is great though if the scene was appropriately lit. Better colors than digital even today. All the catalog photography from the late 90s was medium format slide film and you could blow it up billboard size it had so much fidelity.

[I am not agreeing with the grandparent comment]

Color film typically benefits from optical coatings on the lenses and coated lenses are common from about 1950 onward and uncommon before WWII.

> Suddenly in the 1950's square color photos appear in the collection and the quality is actually some of the worst of all the family photos.

Could part of the problem be that color photos, especially early ones, did not age as well as B&W?

That's a good point. I do digitally correct the scans — which often does pull up the more faded colors getting the color balance often very close to something that looks neutral or normal.

Detail though never appears.

Did something similar with postcards after inheriting some from the late 19th century, but expanded beyond the family. There is a very interesting evolution in printing technologies including inks, printing processes, and paper stock that parallels that of the imaging techniques. In many cases, the clarity obtained with turn of the 20th century techniques, particularly in countries like Germany and Japan, clearly outdo popular modern systems. Good museums for this sort of thing include the Národní technické muzeum (National Technical Museum) in Prague, Czech Republic and the Musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique (Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication) in Lyon, France. https://plasy.ntm.cz/en/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/pr... https://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/en/edito/museum-english-speak...

That's a really neat project! Thanks for sharing.

Please upload these photos to Commons, especially if you own the rights to them; photos taken in the US before 1930 can be shared even if they are not yours, too. These stories and associated artifacts are interesting and deserve to be shared, if you're comfortable with it.

More training material? Why not upload them under the most restrictive copyright possible?

Because Commons won't allow you to. Hilarious anyone thinks a license wards away scrapers, too.

You can obviously upload them to some other place. You mentioned Commons, I did not.

I haven't yet switched over to the view that training material is bad. I'm neutral at this point.

Instead I would rather it be accessible to other relatives that may not be aware of the photos (or are yet to be born).

I've posted already to ancestry.com, findagrave.com, etc. (But I am inclined to do up a blog post about it so I can talk about it and embed the photos.)

Those two are both owned by Ancestry, and as you know, Ancestry requires expensive subscriptions to be of much use. I understand you have already invested a lot in it, and that US genealogy is hard to do with only public sources, but people just getting into genealogy should really avoid getting locked into Ancestry and MyHeritage.

They sell access to what others have contributed freely, sometimes they even sell you your own information back to you. For instance, if you want to use the birth and death dates, sources etc. that you've laboriously entered into a MyHeritage tree in Geni, you need a Geni Pro account. (Geni is owned by MyHeritage).

I think that of the three big American options, FamilySearch is best. Yes, it's the Mormons, and they do have an ulterior motive in their "baptism of the dead" thing, but they don't charge, they have an excellent transcribed source repository, free text search of machine-learning OCRd source documents, and actually smart matching. I'm glad their tithes pay for a state of the art genealogy research platform, I can think of a lot worse things it could have gone to!

They're also, interestingly enough, the least Anglo-biased: they don't give a child their father's last name by default, for instance.

The main downside is that they don't have any DNA features.

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