David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
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.
Yes they are modern restorations but if the color information was not
in the separations - gamut, color purity etc. - it would not be
possible to recapture the image data to create such amazing images. I
suspect you are right, he probably never saw his images as beautifully
as they were capable of being presented today.
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.
In the 1905 to 1915 time frame how many color photos have you seen?
Other than crude dyed rice grain color photos I have seen very few.
Kodachrome was not yet available. We do not know if he or others were
making dye transfers but I doubt it. Having worked in a custom photo
lab in Hollywood after returning from two years as a combat
photographer in Vietnam I can say that dye transfers are the finest
color prints that have ever seen and they were made using color
separations but mostly from chromes not in-camera. And all of the
chromes I shot in Vietnam, Kodachrome and Ektachrome, have faded
significantly. So much color info has disappeared from the Ektachromes
as to no longer be possible to recover anything approaching normal
color from them.
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.
It is the aluminized reflective coating that determines CD or DVD
lifetime. My Dad made an 8" telescope with aluminized mirror. We were
living in the San Fernando Valley near LA in the 1970s and within 10
years he was having the mirror recoated because acids in the smog had
eaten away aluminum. I suspect Sony's 50 years is a good average
lifetime for digital images saved to CD or DVD. The mag tape lifetime
is different because it uses iron oxide. If you have ever read Sony's
founder, Morita's, book he tells of coating iron oxide onto tape for
their first R&D tape recorder in his kitchen with a paint brush
after WWII.
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.
I think that is what worries historians. Here in New Mexico Dana Knee
has been printing from the nitrate based B&W 8x10 images that his
Dad shot in the 1930s. Ernest Knee and Laura Gilpin were among the
early photographers to shoot landscapes here and Knee was Howard Huges'
personal photographer until after the crash and Howard got so daffy.
Now he has them stored in controlled, archival conditions but for a
long time they were not and even this most fragile of B&W neg has
survived - much of what he shot - because of dry conditions here. While
it is possible to make an exact copy of a digital image, this will only
be true as long as the media it is stored upon survives and the error
correction technique robustness it uses allow reading the image. My
hunch is that historian concerns are valid and that most of what gets
shot digitally will have a lifetime about as short as the interval
between advances in shooting digitally. It is both a recording media
issue and a societal or cultural issue - we are an instant
gratification society with little thought given to the lifetime of
images. There are tons more images being shot but how many of
consequence will get refreshed after the photographer passes on? I
think it is a valid concern. I wonder even how many on this list have a
strategy or plan for preserving their original images?
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.
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