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Developing 120-year-old photos found in a time capsule [video]
- JaneJLocane 3y agoThanks for useful info!
- JaneJLocane 3y ago[flagged]
- politelemon 3y agoI find it so immensely wholesome and amusing that even then, people liked taking photos of their pets. This is the connection we have across the ages, cat photos. There's a follow up where they colorize the first cat photo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eblNBqTD58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eblNBqTD58 And link to the author's site: https://mathieustern.darkroom.com/collections/the-cat https://mathieustern.darkroom.com/collections/the-cat
- codetrotter 3y ago> https://mathieustern.darkroom.com/collections/the-cat https://mathieustern.darkroom.com/collections/the-cat I think $96 USD is a lot for a print. I’d pay that much for a limited, numbered, run of photos that he’d developed in the same way as in the video, directly from the glass plate. But not for a scanned print.
- a012 3y agoHe's using darkroom.com's service, I don't know specifically but he'd receive much less than $96/print
- xvedejas 3y agoAnd I personally wouldn't pay any more just because a print was limited. It's almost as if people have different values they assign to products. Shame he didn't consult you before setting his price?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- callalex 3y agoWhat’s the point of limiting the availability of art? Art is meant to create experiences for people, and limiting reproduction is antithetical to that goal. It is useful for gross capitalists that want to seek rent on the human experience though…
- codetrotter 3y agoHe can print as many scanned copies as he wants. I’m just saying that for $96 USD I would not want it to he a scanned print, but a limited direct production. Sell five hundred real ones for $96 USD a piece. And then sell unlimited prints for like $20 USD each or something.
- vasco 3y agoArtists need to eat. And if you make something that everyone can have, it's not art anymore really, it's the equivalent of an ikea frame in an airbnb that looks like every other airbnb.
- lmpdev 3y agoA commodity?
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- INTPenis 3y agoAnd even ancient romans wrote eulogies and raised funeral stelae for their dogs.
- telesilla 3y agoI wonder how future generations will see our digital artefacts, pixelated and 2 dimensional. Old-timey the way we see 1900s film.
- soperj 3y agoSome early film is more innovative than most film these days.
- verisimi 3y agoDo you think they will be able to access them? They are rather immaterial...
- Tagbert 3y agoFor archeologists, some of the most common and valuable placed to dig are called “middens”. That is an old word that means trash dump. They are a source of tons of information on everyday lives of people of the past.
- verisimi 3y agoRight - but you realise that on computers "trashcans" are just a metaphor? There's no actual digging to be done.
- Archelaos 3y agoThey must have a very different impression of the past than we do. Imagine if we had live footage of Roman emperors or people hunting mammoths.
- b112 3y agoYes! Even movies from the 30s, b+w as they are, show us people 100 years back. Cities 100 years back. And a lot of that is now digitized, and kept by cinema lovers worldwide. We've always had to guess before, wonder, go by (comparatively) rare paintings, which may or may not have artistic changes. Even language has become more static, more uniform, starting with wide spread printed works, then radio, TV, now internet. If I look at works 100 years back, many of them could gave been written today. 150 years? Change becomes more rapid.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoI have lots of pictures from about the same epoch (probably from some great-great-great-grandparents or something like that), also on glass, with a similar name (I'm on vacation atm so I don't have them handy): maybe not "Photocrom" but something not unlike that. And I've seen people "developing" them using another method: I'm not sure if they're the same thing or not. I clearly remember reading a blog where the person did built a little wooden box, padded the inside of the box with aluminum foil, then put a DSLR camera on a tripod. He'd then place one of these "glass" photo on the box, take a picture with the DSLR, then move on to the next "glass" photo. And then do some processing in whatever software (and the result was great). If I recall correctly I read that these old glass photos now after 100+ years begin to fade and those that aren't developed are soon going to be lost.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBy developing is generally meant the chemical process of converting the invisible image created by photons changing the electron state of silvery stuff on the plate or film, into a fixed, visible image. What you describe is the process of inverting a negative image into a positive. (Black to white and vice versa.) Also very important because as you say, the images can fade over time.
- sys32768 3y agoI scanned a couple dozen of them from the 1910s on an Epson Perfection V600 flatbed scanner. Incredible detail on the resulting scans, so the original camera must have had quite a lens, not to mention a good photographer.
- jacquesm 3y agoOld lenses were either pinholes or very large because the emulsions were so slow they needed a lot of light to gain exposure. My dad collected old cameras, the pinhole ones would work but were a complete pain for anything that wasn't a still-life, for a Daguerreotype you had to sit still for a very long time but it did work if you were patient enough. The lens based cameras did a better job, and also could make Daguerreotypes in a much shorter time. Making these is not without danger: you sensitize the copper silver coated plate (which you apply using silver nitrate) with iodine and you develop it using - no kidding - mercury vapors. I wonder if the very large bottle of Mercury that he had is still sitting in the basement there. I also remember playing with the iodine crystals that had migrated through the double walls of glass that they were supposedly contained in...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37290310
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoYeah, downvote FACT. Go back to Reddit.
- ruined 3y agoi wouldn't call this "developing", the negative is already developed. this is simply making a contact print. if you do find undeveloped exposures, the emulsion is likely very degraded. film or glass plate is likely standard silver and may still be easily developed at home with any standard black and white process, but most historic color film chemistry has been lost. your local lab should be able to identify it for you and explain your options.
- reportgunner 3y agoThis. I got three old films developed last month, two were about 10-12 years ago and one was even older. Out of two "younger" films the color one had all it's black replaced by blue and the other one was pushed 3 stops and turned out fine. The "oldest" film was completely blank.
- actionfromafar 3y agoA neat trick is that almost all color film can be developed as a black and white, with cheap black and white developer and fixer. (Of course you will loose the color and get only a black and white picture.) In a pinch, you can mix lukewarm coffee with a generous helping of baking soda for developer, and sea water for fixer. (Not tap water nor lake water.)
- ruined 3y agoi've done the color-as-bw trick, and it works, but everything looks like garbage, more than i would normally expect. baking soda seems like a poor choice, i've heard borax and soda ash (carbonate rather than bicarbonate) more commonly recommended. maybe it would work in a pinch but baking soda is significantly less basic and might produce gas during the reaction which seems problematic. but sea water for fixer, that's interesting, never considered that one. is it really ionic enough? i guess i could boil down a reduction edit: chatgpt seems to think i'd need to concentrate it to saturation and at that point i might as well just use table salt. do you have any experience with this? how does the negative hold up over time?
- 3y ago
- fortran77 3y agoMisleading title. He didn't "develop" 120-year-old latent images. This was a developed, stable negative from which he made positive prints. What's interesting is that 120-year-old image formats, in the form of a photographic negative, can still be read today. Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now? That's why every year I take 50 or so photos and get them printed and bound in a photobook. (There are many vendors that do this, and it's not that expensive.)
- worrycue 3y ago> Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now? The photos are trivial to copy though and will likely be preserved, if the owner chooses to do so, by being replicated across multiple storage devices over time.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's making a lot of assumptions.
- firecall 3y agoWe don't need to, and nor should we, save every photo that everyone has ever take on their smartphone. Thats madness... :-) Sometimes things get lost and destroyed, and thats OK.
- worrycue 3y agoCompanies like Apple kind of do it for you as you upgrade from iPhone to iPhone and data from your old phone is transferred to the new one.
- b112 3y agoIn 120 years, no one may have heard of Apple.
- Aloha 3y agoAlso known as a blueprint. One of the easiest photographic printing mediums. Generally quite stable too.
- petabytes 3y ago7 or so years ago I bought an old brownie camera and I found a roll of film in it. Still have no idea what's on it. I read that I shouldnt expose it to any light.
- actionfromafar 3y agoShoot the remaining film if any left. Wind up the last bit. Take the film out, keep a bit of tape or rubber band at hand so it won’t unroll, you want to keep the wind pretty tight. Then either send it to a lab or develop yourself! Put a nice color film for your next roll, the juxtaposition of “modern” color film in such an old camera is fun. Shoot in bright daylight. High noon or at least some sun.
- petabytes 3y agoThe camera is busted up. Although to be honest, I don't ever think I had thought of trying to fix it to take pictures... It's just been sitting on a shelf. Looks nice.
- actionfromafar 3y agoOuch, it must have taken quite a beating. :-) These shutters are almost indestructible. The cameras certainly are nice shelf queens, too.