A friend wrote in with an interesting question:
Q. I have attached 3 photos from the early 1940's available from the net. Although B&W, all three seem to show the blue color scheme without the front door and around the windows appearing to be red. Was this an earlier variant of the blue-red scheme? Was the front grey? Two show the 308 so painted and in the other the 318 seems to be similarly painted. There are also pictures on the net showing the 319 so painted at Trolleyville, but I know that they didn't care about "correct" colors. Could you explain the colors in these photos?
A. It's due to the use of different types of black and white film available at that time. They had different responses to various colors, and red in particular tended to vary. In one type red tended to appear very dark, in another type very light. Here's an illustration: look at these two photos.
These show the same car in exactly the same paint scheme. (They might even have been taken on the same fantrip.) In one, the red ends appear as light as the grey, in the other they're darker than the blue, nearly black. So determining the colors from a black and white photograph is not easy.
On the CA&E, the various paint schemes had different patterns of the different colors, and that's how we generally decide which paint scheme we're looking at.
Hope this helps!
A. It's due to the use of different types of black and white film available at that time. They had different responses to various colors, and red in particular tended to vary. In one type red tended to appear very dark, in another type very light. Here's an illustration: look at these two photos.
These show the same car in exactly the same paint scheme. (They might even have been taken on the same fantrip.) In one, the red ends appear as light as the grey, in the other they're darker than the blue, nearly black. So determining the colors from a black and white photograph is not easy.
On the CA&E, the various paint schemes had different patterns of the different colors, and that's how we generally decide which paint scheme we're looking at.
Hope this helps!
4 comments:
The two types of film were called orthochromatic and panchromatic. Orthochromatic was more sensitive to green light, but not sensitive to red. It was a very old emulsion, created so early (and, later, amateur) photographers could develop their film in the red light of a darkroom. Kodak Verichrome, for many years the standard roll-film for box cameras, was orthochromatic for much of its existence.
Panchromatic, on the other hand, was sensitive to all colors and had to be developed in darkness. All modern b/w film emulsions made today are panchromatic. For older films, the incorporation of "pan" into the name (such as Tri-X Pan) was to indicate that it was a full-spectrum-sensitive film.
As to how the emulsion affected the image, I know that lighter colors such as red, orange and yellow appear darker with orthochromatic film than with panchromatic.
In follow-up to my prior comment, the photo on the right was made with orthochromatic film.
By the time I became interested in B&W photography in the mid 1990s, orthochromatic film was not easy to find.
I used Kodak Tri-X Pan for work on my high school yearbook. It gave good results, at ISO 400, and it was cheap. The sports editor of my local hometown newspaper would let me order through the paper, so I'd order 100' rolls and use the bulk loader.
Ahh, the good days.
Thanks for the additional details, Scott and David! I knew I could count on our readers out there to fill in the parts I wasn't sure of.
I also fixed a mistake in the original post: "darker than the blue" is what I meant to say.
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