4 ms·

Quite amazingly - I never realised how good photo quality was in the 1930s (and presumably earlier too). Look at these examples which were immediately digitised

Quite amazingly - I never realised how good photo quality was in the 1930s (and presumably earlier too). Look at these examples which were immediately digitised (one of a WWII reenactment scene which enhances the effect) - they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear. https://licm.org.uk/livingImage/Leica_II-Results.html https://licm.org.uk/livingImage/Leica_II-Results.html

card_zero 2y ago
They're not using 1930s film, which would be early Kodachrome and somewhat blurry, I think.
lqet 2y ago
> they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear You should have a look into Autochrome photography. The photos look amazingly realistic for their age. For example, these are from 1913: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/gallery/autochrome-christina/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/gallery/autochrome-... Wikipedia also has an amazing collection of works by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery From 1909: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Gorskii_04422u.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Gorskii_... Autochrome of the 1909 Paris Air Show: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNHVt00nUlgx4vpP6GtzW6Odob3W9vCwiasCPKPd0rPbAW8HAEs-MAJEsifh8dCkWvPymMLtG7QeWdnCgZlfxtqnR30EDQgEo27CnnPXJXZVRbVoE1r6HiYmRamO7MpgvKrfo7JFVPaXpJ/s1200/BAB4.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg... Also Paris, 1910: https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/albert-kahns-archives-of-the-planet/06-Paris(XVIIIearr.)-FranceLeMoulin-Rouge-boulevarddeClichy_A7462-edit-double.jpg?fit=max&w=1200&h=850&auto=format,compress https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/albert-kah...
kqr 2y ago
I mean, sure, but it depends a lot along which dimension you make the comparison. There, you are looking at a shot in broad daylight, on modern film, printed at a small size. To make it more obvious, here's a comparison: The daylight shot printed at small size[1] appears fairly detailed. The same film, same photographer, same camera, etc. only at night and presented as an ostensibly high-resolution picture[2] starts to reveal the problems with the older tech. Usually the cameras themselves are fine – we perfected optics enough to not be a problem on 35 mm film in the 1800s – it's the medium on which the image is recorded that is more finicky. However, if we put the old optics onto modern sensors, we would start to notice its problems too. I don't have an example at hand, but there's noticeable chromatic aberration (no problem on black and white film!) among other things. [1]: https://i.xkqr.org/22067536038_1aa2f85cc0_o.jpg https://i.xkqr.org/22067536038_1aa2f85cc0_o.jpg [2]: https://i.xkqr.org/25120912716_d3822007b9_o.jpg https://i.xkqr.org/25120912716_d3822007b9_o.jpg
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- foldr 2y ago
  Nit pick: chromatic aberration is a significant problem on panchromatic black and white film. (You don’t get color banding, for obvious reasons, but you do lose sharpness.) This is why the development of achromatic lenses long predates the widespread use of color photography.
  - kqr 2y ago
    That makes sense but I had never considered it. Thanks!
darkfloo 2y ago
Medium to some extent and large format can produce some exceptional image quality (Sharpness, details and contrast). Cliché at this point but Ansel Adams work still look very modern today. They where however slow, heavy ,difficult to work with and extremely expensive so most people stuck to small format when they became available . In fact I would bet that most pictures taken before small format took over look better technically than after it took over
foldr 2y ago
There are lots of high quality photos from the 1930s. Look at studio portraits of movie stars, for example. I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from.
- guax 2y ago
  I think there is a conjunction of factors at play. Only slower film available means no clear images of action. No digital copies means that most pictures have had LOTS of time to deteriorate before being digitised and reproduced. Most people see images from the 30s as a one copy of a picture the great great grandpa had in a shoebox kept in a moist cellar and no negatives to recover. I think most people would have had contact with old pictures from newspaper and books that did not prized image quality so you mostly see bad quality pictures with low dynamic range. The most important pictures of the olden eras, in an artistic setting, would also be experimental photography which is not necessarily concerned with sharpness and traditional qualities, so you see weird stuff. And, the main culprit, as for most of society misconceptions. Movies and tv shows, you have to age and crap out a picture to look old. I am certainly that the screwed up videotape effect will skew a lot of the expectation of old footage from the 80s-90s. Put all of that together, there is where I think the expectation comes from. I have the book Great War, Photographic Narrative. With images from the first world war, the quality of some of the images is outstanding. Those same images would've look terrible on old mass produced books and newspapers.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    And all of those factors get compounded when the resultant picture is then a) poorly digitized b) compressed for upload.
- kalleboo 2y ago
  > I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from. It probably comes from all the crappy dim, faded family photos from the 70's and 80's
i_am_proteus 2y ago
1930s films were slower (lower ASA/ISO) than "modern" films. Focusing mechanisms were worse: the SLR was developed in the 1930s; most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot'). Cameras and lenses were technically capable of high-quality images, but actually making such a photograph required skill or luck; the results were otherwise blurry and poorly-focused. Studio portraits in those days used extremely bright lights to compensate.
- ghaff 2y ago
  In general, the ISO capabilities of modern digital (especially larger sensor cameras but even good phone cameras) is a remarkable advance over film even relatively latterly. With digital, ISO of 3200 or 6400 is nothing (probably better today with full frame). B&W film really topped out at about 400 in normal use and couldn't really be pushed past 1600 and even that required chemistry tricks and resulted in noticeably lower quality.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Nitpick, no (edit: chemical) tricks needed, just double the developing time.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I did this for years. I tended to use different chemistries for pushing Tri-X or HP5 to 1600+. Don't remember the details, but didn't tend to use D-76 for pushed film as I recall.
      - hypercube33 2y ago
        I love shooting BW film but Tri-X looks so newspapery or silver to me - I tend to prefer the newer Kentmere films. I've found you can still push them pretty far and not pay a large price. The film is just so forgiving compared to digital (at least to the best of 2014 sensors)
  - i_am_proteus 2y ago
Gibbon1 2y ago
Photo quality could be really good with lots of light, the right exposure, and fine grained film. Age can also be unkind to old photo's. Especially color I swear the dyes fade causing the colors to be muted and muddy. And tend to slowly bleed making them blurry.
Etheryte 2y ago
By the 1930s, photography as a field had already existed for a century or so, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to look terrible in any meaning of the word. For comparison, here's a photograph taken almost a hundred years earlier in 1845 [0], aside form lacking colors, it too is already high quality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreotypist,_1845_(with_Frame).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreoty...
- gyomu 2y ago
  Well, I’m not surprised they’re surprised. The two main factors in image quality are optics (which has been a solved problem for a long time), and imaging surface area. Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use. Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    >image quality is as low as it gets I'm going to dispute that. Given some constraints in both the subject and the use of the image, certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures. I have a bunch of bigger gear and I mostly don't find it worth taking on trips any longer. Yes, it's older gear but I doubt I'd find it worth spending thousands of dollars to upgrade. I know other serious photographers who feel similarly.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      I agree with you only so long as you want to look at those images on those same small devices. The moment you want to print something, the difference is night and day. That being said, I'm a very big believer of the best camera being the one you have with you, so.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Agree. I have digitized family photos from a tintype in 1880 or so all the way to Polaroids from the 1960's and it is clear to me that peak consumer-photography was late-stage B&W photography. I shouldn't have mentioned the tintype above (I just wanted to indicate the temporal range here) because I would exclude professional "portrait" photos. And my relatives were blue-collar farmers and factory workers in the Midwaste, so their "gear" was modest for the times. The oldest "home photos" look poor and likely came from a Brownie or similar. But then a decade or so on and the photos take on a whole new level of clarity and sharpness. That level of quality persists until the arrival of color, Polaroids.... It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.
- lqet 2y ago
  > It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century. Absolutely. My parents have crisp B&W snapshots from their baby years in the early 60ies. They even have old B&W party snapshots from my grandparents in the 50ies, all of which look still great. Then around 1965, the snapshots become colored (not Polaroids), and the quality is... not as good. I wonder of the photographs just aged badly, or if they already looked like that 60 years ago. I also suspect that color film was much more expensive back then than B&W film, and the average consumer just bought the cheapest color films they could get.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    With old color prints (or slides, non-Kodachrome in particular) there's a lot of fading relative to B&W of the equivalent era. There was definitely a period, when there were really crappy cameras (e.g. Instamatics) for the mass market which were far crappier than any random smartphone these days. And there were really good, often (West) German-made, cameras. I'd have to look up exactly when the good Japanese cameras came along.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Nikon wasn't exactly consumer gear, but they popularized single lens reflex cameras in the late 1960s.
ekianjo 2y ago
They had much bigger negative surface. Medium and large format have a resolution that digital cameras can only dream of
EncomLab 2y ago
Film grain resolutions for high quality emulsions can result in nearly perfect image representations, even under pretty high magnifications. Digital imaging is limited to the pixels on the sensor and/or the display.

card_zero 2y ago

They're not using 1930s film, which would be early Kodachrome and somewhat blurry, I think.

lqet 2y ago

> they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear You should have a look into Autochrome photography. The photos look amazingly realistic for their age. For example, these are from 1913: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/gallery/autochrome-christina/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/gallery/autochrome-... Wikipedia also has an amazing collection of works by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery From 1909: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Gorskii_04422u.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Gorskii_... Autochrome of the 1909 Paris Air Show: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNHVt00nUlgx4vpP6GtzW6Odob3W9vCwiasCPKPd0rPbAW8HAEs-MAJEsifh8dCkWvPymMLtG7QeWdnCgZlfxtqnR30EDQgEo27CnnPXJXZVRbVoE1r6HiYmRamO7MpgvKrfo7JFVPaXpJ/s1200/BAB4.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg... Also Paris, 1910: https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/albert-kahns-archives-of-the-planet/06-Paris(XVIIIearr.)-FranceLeMoulin-Rouge-boulevarddeClichy_A7462-edit-double.jpg?fit=max&w=1200&h=850&auto=format,compress https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/albert-kah...

kqr 2y ago

I mean, sure, but it depends a lot along which dimension you make the comparison. There, you are looking at a shot in broad daylight, on modern film, printed at a small size. To make it more obvious, here's a comparison: The daylight shot printed at small size[1] appears fairly detailed. The same film, same photographer, same camera, etc. only at night and presented as an ostensibly high-resolution picture[2] starts to reveal the problems with the older tech. Usually the cameras themselves are fine – we perfected optics enough to not be a problem on 35 mm film in the 1800s – it's the medium on which the image is recorded that is more finicky. However, if we put the old optics onto modern sensors, we would start to notice its problems too. I don't have an example at hand, but there's noticeable chromatic aberration (no problem on black and white film!) among other things. [1]: https://i.xkqr.org/22067536038_1aa2f85cc0_o.jpg https://i.xkqr.org/22067536038_1aa2f85cc0_o.jpg [2]: https://i.xkqr.org/25120912716_d3822007b9_o.jpg https://i.xkqr.org/25120912716_d3822007b9_o.jpg

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
foldr 2y ago
Nit pick: chromatic aberration is a significant problem on panchromatic black and white film. (You don’t get color banding, for obvious reasons, but you do lose sharpness.) This is why the development of achromatic lenses long predates the widespread use of color photography.
- kqr 2y ago
  That makes sense but I had never considered it. Thanks!

darkfloo 2y ago

Medium to some extent and large format can produce some exceptional image quality (Sharpness, details and contrast). Cliché at this point but Ansel Adams work still look very modern today. They where however slow, heavy ,difficult to work with and extremely expensive so most people stuck to small format when they became available . In fact I would bet that most pictures taken before small format took over look better technically than after it took over

foldr 2y ago

There are lots of high quality photos from the 1930s. Look at studio portraits of movie stars, for example. I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from.

guax 2y ago
I think there is a conjunction of factors at play. Only slower film available means no clear images of action. No digital copies means that most pictures have had LOTS of time to deteriorate before being digitised and reproduced. Most people see images from the 30s as a one copy of a picture the great great grandpa had in a shoebox kept in a moist cellar and no negatives to recover. I think most people would have had contact with old pictures from newspaper and books that did not prized image quality so you mostly see bad quality pictures with low dynamic range. The most important pictures of the olden eras, in an artistic setting, would also be experimental photography which is not necessarily concerned with sharpness and traditional qualities, so you see weird stuff. And, the main culprit, as for most of society misconceptions. Movies and tv shows, you have to age and crap out a picture to look old. I am certainly that the screwed up videotape effect will skew a lot of the expectation of old footage from the 80s-90s. Put all of that together, there is where I think the expectation comes from. I have the book Great War, Photographic Narrative. With images from the first world war, the quality of some of the images is outstanding. Those same images would've look terrible on old mass produced books and newspapers.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  And all of those factors get compounded when the resultant picture is then a) poorly digitized b) compressed for upload.
kalleboo 2y ago
> I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from. It probably comes from all the crappy dim, faded family photos from the 70's and 80's

i_am_proteus 2y ago

1930s films were slower (lower ASA/ISO) than "modern" films. Focusing mechanisms were worse: the SLR was developed in the 1930s; most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot'). Cameras and lenses were technically capable of high-quality images, but actually making such a photograph required skill or luck; the results were otherwise blurry and poorly-focused. Studio portraits in those days used extremely bright lights to compensate.

ghaff 2y ago
In general, the ISO capabilities of modern digital (especially larger sensor cameras but even good phone cameras) is a remarkable advance over film even relatively latterly. With digital, ISO of 3200 or 6400 is nothing (probably better today with full frame). B&W film really topped out at about 400 in normal use and couldn't really be pushed past 1600 and even that required chemistry tricks and resulted in noticeably lower quality.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Nitpick, no (edit: chemical) tricks needed, just double the developing time.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I did this for years. I tended to use different chemistries for pushing Tri-X or HP5 to 1600+. Don't remember the details, but didn't tend to use D-76 for pushed film as I recall.
    - hypercube33 2y ago
      I love shooting BW film but Tri-X looks so newspapery or silver to me - I tend to prefer the newer Kentmere films. I've found you can still push them pretty far and not pay a large price. The film is just so forgiving compared to digital (at least to the best of 2014 sensors)
- i_am_proteus 2y ago

Gibbon1 2y ago

Photo quality could be really good with lots of light, the right exposure, and fine grained film. Age can also be unkind to old photo's. Especially color I swear the dyes fade causing the colors to be muted and muddy. And tend to slowly bleed making them blurry.

Etheryte 2y ago

By the 1930s, photography as a field had already existed for a century or so, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to look terrible in any meaning of the word. For comparison, here's a photograph taken almost a hundred years earlier in 1845 [0], aside form lacking colors, it too is already high quality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreotypist,_1845_(with_Frame).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreoty...

gyomu 2y ago
Well, I’m not surprised they’re surprised. The two main factors in image quality are optics (which has been a solved problem for a long time), and imaging surface area. Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use. Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.
- ghaff 2y ago
  >image quality is as low as it gets I'm going to dispute that. Given some constraints in both the subject and the use of the image, certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures. I have a bunch of bigger gear and I mostly don't find it worth taking on trips any longer. Yes, it's older gear but I doubt I'd find it worth spending thousands of dollars to upgrade. I know other serious photographers who feel similarly.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    I agree with you only so long as you want to look at those images on those same small devices. The moment you want to print something, the difference is night and day. That being said, I'm a very big believer of the best camera being the one you have with you, so.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Agree. I have digitized family photos from a tintype in 1880 or so all the way to Polaroids from the 1960's and it is clear to me that peak consumer-photography was late-stage B&W photography. I shouldn't have mentioned the tintype above (I just wanted to indicate the temporal range here) because I would exclude professional "portrait" photos. And my relatives were blue-collar farmers and factory workers in the Midwaste, so their "gear" was modest for the times. The oldest "home photos" look poor and likely came from a Brownie or similar. But then a decade or so on and the photos take on a whole new level of clarity and sharpness. That level of quality persists until the arrival of color, Polaroids.... It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.

lqet 2y ago
> It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century. Absolutely. My parents have crisp B&W snapshots from their baby years in the early 60ies. They even have old B&W party snapshots from my grandparents in the 50ies, all of which look still great. Then around 1965, the snapshots become colored (not Polaroids), and the quality is... not as good. I wonder of the photographs just aged badly, or if they already looked like that 60 years ago. I also suspect that color film was much more expensive back then than B&W film, and the average consumer just bought the cheapest color films they could get.
- ghaff 2y ago
  With old color prints (or slides, non-Kodachrome in particular) there's a lot of fading relative to B&W of the equivalent era. There was definitely a period, when there were really crappy cameras (e.g. Instamatics) for the mass market which were far crappier than any random smartphone these days. And there were really good, often (West) German-made, cameras. I'd have to look up exactly when the good Japanese cameras came along.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Nikon wasn't exactly consumer gear, but they popularized single lens reflex cameras in the late 1960s.

ekianjo 2y ago

They had much bigger negative surface. Medium and large format have a resolution that digital cameras can only dream of

EncomLab 2y ago

Film grain resolutions for high quality emulsions can result in nearly perfect image representations, even under pretty high magnifications. Digital imaging is limited to the pixels on the sensor and/or the display.