> 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.

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johnmaguire a day ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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JKCalhoun a day ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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_aavaa_ a day ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	johnmaguire 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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?
	▲	brudgers 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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brudgers 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[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.

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bugsMarathon88 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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JKCalhoun a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.)

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bgwalter a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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JKCalhoun a day ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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bugsMarathon88 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	bgwalter a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can obviously upload them to some other place. You mentioned Commons, I did not.

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bell-cot a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

	▲	JKCalhoun 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.