On Thu, December 17, 2009 11:25, Ruey wrote: > I imagine most people on this list have seen the Russian tricolor > exhibit at the Smithsonian website. > http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html > http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ > > These photos seem so remarkable. When we do get to see early photos they > are always in B&W. To see photo journalistic photos shot between 1905 > and 1915 in color is quite unusual. I wish I knew how his camera worked. > It appears that the back had to do with shooting the tricolor exposures. > And judging by the large number of well registered people shots it must > have allowed the three separations to be shot in rapid succession. What > further baffles me is that I thought only orthochromatic film was > available back then. In the movies they were powdering faces white to > get lighter complexions in B&W movies yet here he is shooting tricolor > separations that have lifelike skin tones in color so he must have had a > good red neg. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom two images and zoom > them up to see what incredible color his separation negatives were > capable of. Talk about Kodachrome color! If you compare the spectral > curves for modern digital sensors to what is possible with either the > 25-58-47B or sharper cutting 29-61-47B tricolor sets it is easy to see > color separation is about as good as it gets doing in-camera RGB > separations and that the modern way has huge overlaps in color and thus > color purity in comparison. The Prokudin-Gorskii photos are astonishing. One thing to bear in mind, though, is that what we're seeing is modern expert restorations. The colors look true because experts at the Smithsonian have carefully color-balanced their versions of the images. I don't know how they would look projected with his original flame-powered tri-color slide projector. His three separations do seem to be at very similar overall density levels, suggesting that he had fairly well-behaved separation filters. I've made a couple of my own restorations, just to see what it's like, and his color filters seem to match my monitor colors surprisingly well -- I don't have to do any really drastic color adjustments to get it looking right. > It is because he shot these on B&W film as tricolor separation negatives > that we can view them today. Any other form of color film would have > faded away by now. That's a bit extreme. It's just 100 years. Kodachrome would have considerable color left (especially if stored ideally, in humidity-controlled cold). Dye transfer prints (which is admittedly not a film) would also last in this range. As would many modern inkjet prints. > And we will have to wait and see how many digital > images do survive. That's the one really inarguable claim one can make on the top :-). We can have all the theories in the world, but we won't know until we get there. > Sony recommends re-recording or refreshing disc media > every 50 years. Wow, that seems astonishingly optimistic to me. 15 years is often cited as optimistic for any floppy or old-style magtape media. > Since I built my first microcomputer in 1978 I have had > 5 1/4" hard sectored floppies, 8" floppies, IBM 5 1/4" soft sectored > floppies, 3 inch rigid floppies, Iomega discs, CDs, DVDs and now > something like BluRay will be taking over for storing images I guess. > I'd be hard pressed to recover images from most of those digital storage > formats now, so that film does not look like such an archaic choice if > archival access and precise color are significant issues. I've got a lot of text that originated on those media. And I can actually still read most of the media I've owned the computer for -- back to 5.25" floppies (IBM style). It's the DECtape and the 16-track magtape I can't read, and I know commercial data-transfer houses can read 16-track magtape easily still (mine has nothing important on it at this point). Digital archives are potentially tremendously longer-lived than analog media -- they can take advantage of replication and geographic separation, without any degradation and at lower cost. But digital media tends to do very poorly *when ignored*. "Benign neglect" is not a viable archival strategy for digital archives. So there's this bifurcation -- stuff in a managed archive will last really well, but stuff just kicking around is much less likely to make it. However, with the number of DVDs of pictures kicking around, rather a lot of them will have recoverable images for future archaeologists and historians. We can't predict which ones from here, but quite a few good DVDs will last 100 years, or even more. And of course there are huge quantities of images online at Flickr and Photo.net and Smugmug and Picasa. If I have a flood or fire (or meteor strike :-)), I'll lose nearly all of my film images, except for the ones I've scanned. The scanned ones, and most of my digital images (the offsite location depends on hand-carrying disks), will probably come through fine (since they exist in copies 50 miles from my house). But if, 100 years after my death, somebody finds my digital and film image archives in an attic where they've been sitting all that time, yeah, they're more likely to be able to do something with the old B&W negatives. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
