Photography and the Environment

Pictures were manufactured back then with chemicals and without caution. Chemicals, that are now considered dangerous to the environment, were readily available at the corner drug store and at the photograph supply shops for a small price and without question. I don’t remember that age was a factor that had any effect on my buying potassium bichromate, sulfuric acid, silver nitrate or any of the other chemicals which might be an ingredient in making up a recipe for developing, fixing, reducing or intensifying images on negative film.

Early film was celluloid. That’s cellulose nitrate, the same thing as gun cotton. It was extremely inflammable. It was in general use in film for cameras and in movie film until safety film (cellulose acetate) was adopted for use as a film base. It’s adoption must have been a relief to movie projector operators, who no longer had to worry about the frequent film fires, that threatened whenever the film reels were stopped in hot carbon-arced projector systems. It was said that projection booths were locked so operators could perish without unduly endangering moviegoers. If flames didn’t get them, the noxious fumes from explosively burning celluloid would. I have no statistics on how many projectionists became victims of film fires. But, as a teen age experimenter, I learned that just a few frames of movie film, rolled into a tight ½ inch diameter, lit with a match and popped into a coffee can, tightly closed, would result in an explosion which sent the can top high into the air. Film often broke during projection and the projectionist would stop the movie while he trimmed out the damaged section and spliced the broken ends of the film together. The damaged section of film ended up in the alley trash can, where it kept me supplied, so I could show my school mates how to blow up coffee cans. It’s all safety film now, so don’t try it, it won’t work anymore.

After photographic chemicals became exhausted and needed to be disposed of, we flushed them down the drain. These were the days before “environment” was a common word.

Born with an insatiable curiosity, I felt a need to work with and experiment with the technical aspects of photography, particularly on varying developers and time of development, as well as changing lighting and exposure times. I found that portrait photography could be improved from the norm by grossly increasing the time of development, after purposely under exposing the film. This process separated the facial highlights and resulted in a graduation of skin tones. It gave character and form to the facial image. The “norm” in exposure and film development had most often resulted in stark-white flat faces without depth and roundness. Depending on temperature common film developers called for 10 or 15 minutes of developing time. My under exposed film sometimes required a full hour, and additional bromide to resist fogging (graying) due to the extreme development time.

My discovery was not the discovery of a lifetime! When my enthusiasm for the art of photography led to my reading books written by those who were to become my heroes, I learned that my discovery was already known. Previously discovered and mostly rejected. It was not practiced in established studios because of the time it consumed. As they say, “Time is money”. Professional photographers do not have the luxury of experimenting with each order and fine-tuning to get each exposure and developing time just right with varying subjects.

Anyhow, improvements in materials and in lighting later made my procedure unnecessary to achieve the same results. Logic would have compelled me to study my books, and apply the procedures described to me by master photographers. But, I continued to pursue my dreams, while my photographs continued to be compromised by experimental tinkering. My pictures generally weren’t very good at that stage, but then my time was not worth money, so I continued to experiment and did not neglect the time of development and exposure thing. Some of my worst and some of my best portraits used the process. Even later, when I had a studio of my own, I often used the procedure on friends, who would pose, gratis after hours. So photography was sometimes still a hobby with me, even then, and I produced portraits that I am still most proud of, when I took the time required to experiment. This picture of my friend "Mary", which I took back in 1948, used my “underexposure and develop for an hour” procedure. This portrait is still one of my favorites.

The Camera is Born

The camera obscura was first invented long before film and many years before John Herschel coined the word "photography" in 1839.

No one is sure who invented the camera obscura, the forerunner of the camera as we know it. The camera obscura was at first a room-sized compartment that had an aperture, a hole, facing a scene outside that an artist, stationed inside the dark compartment, wished to sketch or paint. The hole, if small enough, acted much like a modern camera lens, in that it projected the scene against the back wall of the compartment, quite dimly and upside down and reversed right to left. This image was smaller than the actual scene. The upside down image could best be seen if a white paper or other light color material, within the compartment, intercepted the projected image. The smaller the aperture, the sharper but dimmer the image became.

Leonardo de Vinci may have been the first to describe the principle of the camera obscura. He did so before he died in 1519. He may have invented it, or he may have only been reporting on a previously invented device. Artists used the camera obscura as an aid to sketch a scene, and would add to the scene or detract from it to produce a work of art. It was a device that might have aided a master artist in completing his masterpiece of a painting. We must not berate him for what we might consider cheating, by using an artificial device to help produce his work of art. The camera obscura was simply an aid, as were his brushes and special pigments.

Later the camera obscura was miniaturized also, made into a portable box, so it could be easily taken to new scenes. It became the “pin hole” camera when imaging materials became available. By the latter half of the 16th century, a crude convex lens replaced the pin hole. The lens admitted more light, making the image in the camera obscura brighter.

As early as 1724 Johanne Heinrich Schultz discovered that a mixture of chalk and silver would record a simple silhouette image. It took another century of experimenting before someone discovered a means to make light sensitive imaging materials, enabling the camera obscura to by-pass the artist by making direct photographs of a scene…and thus the camera was born. In 1826 Joseph Nicephore Niepce built on Schultz’s chalk and silver mixture to produce the first permanent photograph. Soon, in 1835 both Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre simultaneously worked on a system of treating silver plated copper with iodine to obtain a silver iodide photosensitive surface which would record a mirror positive image when it was exposed in a camera and developed with mercury vapor. Daguerre patented the process which took the name Daguerreotype, thus freezing out Talbot. But, on the year of Louis Daguerre’s death in 1851 Fox Talbot produced the wet collodian process. That process, with its advantages, soon replaced the Daguerreotype. The wet collodian process made glass plate negatives, which resulted in sharper non-mirror images from which copies could easily be made, unlike the non-reproducible Daguerreotype.

Direct photographs drove the market, and they started a flurry of experimentation and invention. Newer imaging materials were quickly found and lenses became more complex. Lenses were upgraded to eliminate the chromatic aberration that focused different colors at different points in front of or behind the plate image, which made the image appear out of focus. Spherical aberration, which caused vertical and horizontal lines to appear curved, was also cured by these new lenses. With new lenses pictures became sharper and less distorted.

New photo sensitive materials were found, faster and with grays more acceptable to the eye in representing color. New methods of developing were found, to bring out the latent images produced on the plate and new fixers to make the image more permanent.

I learned and verified much of the proceeding historical data from a book, “Photography Theory and Practice” by L. P. Clerc. It has a chronology of photography covering steps in the history of photography, for the years 1802-1924.

Colorful Photography

At the end of World War 2, when we first became serious about starting our own portrait studio, natural color film did not exist. In order to produce a natural color picture, photography borrowed on the printing industry's method of breaking down a photographed scene into its three elementary colors. Lens filters were used to make three different black and white negatives, each of which represented one of three elementary colors, that were present in the subject scene. The resulting negatives were labeled to indicate which color each negative represented. A typical separation used black and white negatives that represented magenta, cyan and yellow. Sometimes black was added as a fourth color. Printers then made three plates with the three separation negatives, inked them up with different primary colors of ink, and printed them, one over the other in register, thus re-assembling the scene’s original colors. Modern printing may have changed to lithography or some other method of printing but the principle of color separation and re-assembly remains. Photography used the same method of separating colors, but with various methods of re-assembly. Positive films were made from the negatives and were simply dyed and projected onto a white screen at the same time to form a natural color image.

Photographic methods were devised to make natural color permanent images on paper. Many methods were presented as the answer to the problem, but most claims proved to be untested or false. But a very few methods did work and were employed. One method that enjoyed some success was known as a wash-off relief method. In that process the separation negatives were treated chemically to harden the emulsion in proportion to the intensity of image areas. Warm water softened the emulsion so dye was absorbed accordingly, and the dye was transferred to a mordanted paper (chemically treated to accept and to fix the dye) from each color in turn, printed onto the paper in register, with each other. A variation of this method called for treatment of the softened negative images with running warm water, thereby creating an actual relief image which was then inked up with rolled-on appropriate colored greasy ink and printed, each negative in succession, with pressure, on a suitable material. I leave the reader to look up the carbon methods and other methods by which a semblance of natural color was tried. The controls required and the preciseness needed must have resulted in many costly and time-consuming failures, and “success” must have been attained when a mediocre approximation of the natural color resulted.

Making of three-color separation negatives in any one scene required that the subject remain still during the entire procedure. Not only could there not be pictures made of moving objects, but the camera position had to remain steady, and lighting could not vary between exposures, and the subject could not move or change in any way. Cloud movement disallowed most landscape pictures as did wind causing movement in trees and flowers. This kind of problem was partially eliminated with the invention of the one-shot color camera. For the first time, landscape photography and action photography became more possible, even in color. It was a camera that exposed three films at once. With a system of color filters and mirrors inside the camera, it reflected the separated images onto three different films at the same time.

Color film arrived ! But it first arrived in the form of the kind of cut film that was used in large format studio cameras. And it was used in high end advertising photography, but not by small town portrait studios. Initially one 5 x 7 inch sheet of the new color film, a size to fit a small studio camera, would have cost about 16 dollars. After graduating from high school I went to work for a local photographer at a beginning wage of $9.50 for a six day week. Never mind that I, too, considered that slave wages at the time: I use the figure now only to show that the first color film was impossibly expensive. It was not for use by common folk, especially we bumbling common folk who would be apt to use up and waste several sheets of film in the learning how. The exposing properly and the adjusting color temperature of the lights, and the complications of chemical development…well, we adopted a sincere defense in retaining our preference for real black and white photography...where real artists were at work, painting with light and all. Applying heavy oil paints, by hand, to render a sepia toned black and white enlargement into a vibrant colored portrait, like Rembrandt.