I 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.
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.
What’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…
He 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.
Artists 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.
And 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?
I 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.
By 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.
I 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.
Old 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...
As the sibling comments says, if the the lenses were large that was because they had to project a large image circle, not because they gathered more light (per unit area) than modern lenses. Modern lenses generally have wider maximum apertures than lenses from ~100 years ago.
Also, because the maximum f-number was generally around f4-f8 for lenses from that period, it's not really true that these lenses were much bigger than modern 'full frame' lenses. There are plenty of old lenses that have a diameter of just a few centimeters. Here is an example: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1256001801/vintage-19th-cent...
Sure, the glass has gotten much better. But so did the recording material, in fact that's where the real revolution happened and even though superficially there isn't much difference between the earliest light sensitive emulsions and what was used with modern film until not that long ago (and still by some people). There was something called the Schneier (sp?, that guy is everywhere :)) film speed rating, but I no longer have access to any of that stuff (the whole family archive got destroyed :( ), it makes for interesting reading. It was possible to have short exposures but they'd be severely underexposed unless you brought your magnesium flash with you!
This. If you find glass slides, just throw them on a flatbed and it will almost always focus on them perfectly and you can pull some great detail out of them.
The next step which will get you 95% of the way to a great print is to go into Photoshop or similar and do a negative on the image, then, and this is the key, set the black point and white point. Somewhere in your app should be a tool where you can pick the darkest and brightest parts of the scan and it will re-set the levels and the photo will look immaculate. [You can do this on any faded photo, B+W or color] Add a little sharpening and Bob's your uncle.
Misleading 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.)
> Can we feel confident that an Apple HEIC sitting inside an iPhone can be read 120 years from now?
As long as we are still on the same technological path, then yes, we can be confident.
Chemistry and lenses are a form a technology, such as required by developing and printing photographs.
They couldn't be sure that when they invented Photography that people 120 years in the future would be able to work with the negatives.
Certainly people could view prints if they hadnt faded into nothing, but developing or projecting prints from negatives requires a certain level of technology.
Many negatives from the early days of film and photography have just disintegrated and are gone forever. Yes, modern prints are more durable, but they don't last forever. Old processes for analog and digital technologies are often rediscovered.
I'm optimistic :-)
Having said that, digital archive projects are tremendously important to preserving our history.
> 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.
Apple could go bankrupt in 30 years, and 30 years after that, only a tiny smattering of historians might known of it. What would be known 60 years later?
I doubt it. They created the industry milestone products. People like driving vintage cars, operating vintage computers and playing vintage games. These formats aren't going anywhere.
How many people restore old carriages, and use horses to get around? How many people know the manufacturer's names for those carriages?
Sure historians will know, which is a bit of what antique collectors are. But in 120 years? People won't have a clue what Apple was.
In the course of 100+ years, Apple is not important. It had about 15 years of groundbreaking change, now it has none.
And to be fair on that, the computing market is fairly mature now. Their latest AR gambit seems interesting, but it hardly revolutionary.
Look at Rolex watches. They were the pinnacle of innovation in their sector, and a must have for anyone even mildly well to do. Sort of like Apple. They're basically gone now.
i 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.
This. 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.
i'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?
Best is to soak the film in the sea itself for hours, so you get an exchange of fresh ions. It’s not the table salt, NaCl, that (probably??) does the fixing, but other trace ions that does it.
So super market table salt may or may not work.
I put a picture in a saturated solution of cheap horse salt for 24 hours in a soda bottle.
Worked fine!
Re baking soda, it stops fizzling after a minute, and you just have to compensate with more baking soda and/or longer development time.
Re C22 film, it can be developed in C41 chemicals if at room temperature. Increase development time to … more.
For 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.
7 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.
The 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.
There's a follow up where they colorize the first cat photo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eblNBqTD58
And link to the author's site: https://mathieustern.darkroom.com/collections/the-cat