Someone on a different forum posted a link to these, amazing pictures!
And someone else stated they were apparently sourced from here:
Strange to see photo’s from that era in such high-resolution and detail!
I’ve seen them before and really dislike them. They are so damn artificial. The lighting, makeup, poses and clothing choices are so perfect they are like cartoons. Give me a slightly imperfect black and white candid shot any day.
hey, you know that thing you like? It sucks.
I wish my attempts at scanning negatives came out this good. I did several boxes of slides for my dad 15 years ago. There’s an art to getting results like the OP’s link.
I liked all of these a lot.
I often try to imagine what full-color life must’ve looked like back then, as I’ve gotten so used to seeing things in black and white from that era that it’s hard to imagine life not actually being in black and white. These are amazing to see!
Not strange at all, at least to me.
One of the major advantages to Kodachome transparency film was its longevity and resistance to fading. Also, the ISO rating of film of that era was very low; ISO 10-15 in many cases. Low-speed film like that is very fine grained, ergo the high resolution you speak of.
And not only did Kodak discontinue this groundbreaking film, they’ve also announced the end of all their transparency films this month.
While the overly posed propaganda-ish-ness of some of the shots is offputting, the ones where the machinery (especially the B-25’s Douglas Dauntlesses, and P-51 Mustangs) are the focus are gorgeous.
The high resolution is because those are large-format, 4" x 5" film, not itty-bitty 35mm slides.
I love those photos. They still give a pretty good sense of the time even though they’re posed.
I don’t know if they had to do it for these photographs, but the colour might have been corrected digitally. I have an old print from the 70s that has aged terribly, but one click of Automatic Colour Balance makes it look like new.
I love 'em. I can’t imagine how much cooler it will be in 300 years to know that they have photographic evidence of what life was like 400+ years into our past(going back in to the 1800’s).
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school…
Damn, gotta get my Ektachrome used up and developed soon, I guess.
Awesome! Those photos look as if they were taken just yesterday instead of 70 years ago.
Wait, the world wasn’t black and white back then? I can’t imagine it any other way.
Slides used Ektachrome. Kodachrome was for print pictures. Ektachrome has more blues.
I’m not a photographer. I’ve just tried to print from slides with poor results. The differents was explianed to me by the professional who tried to print the pictures.
Kodakchrome was transparency (aka “slide”) film. It used different chemistry than Ektachrome (E-6 is what became standard transparency chemistry. Kodachrome used a proprietary process called K-14, which only a few labs had access to, which is why you had to send it out so often.) but it was still slide film.
ETA: Checking up on it, K-14 was just the final version of the chemistry, in 1974. And until 1954, only Kodak could process Kodachrome, before a lawsuit found it anti-competitive and required Kodak to give independent labs access to its chemistry.
[Calvin’s Dad]The world was black and white back then, but it changed to color in about 1955. That’s why old pictures are in black and white, but old paintings are in color–because the paintings changed to color along with the rest of the world.[/Calvin’s Dad]
Totally disagree. First, the b&w photos we see were just as posed and phony. Second, the world is in color. Give me photos that show the world as it really was. People have always liked color. They wore colorful clothing; they painted their surroundings in bright colors, they appreciated pictures that were colored. These pictures mean a thousand times as much to me as b&w candids.
Silent films weren’t better than talkies either.
Thanks for linking to them, Disposable Hero.
Correction: Kodachrome was also a slide (transparency) film, but a different formulation than Ektachrome. (KM was basically a B/W film where the color dyes were added during the processing; EK color dyes were incorporated into the film itself. KM was a specialized development process*, only done by Kodak and a few commercial labs, while virtually any lab with the right equipment was able to process EK.)
Kodacolor was for print pictures.
And prints can be made from slides, they just require an internegative, making the prints third generation, with some expected loss of sharpness and detail, depending upon your lab. There was (still is?) a process called Cibachrome (later Ilfochrome) that made prints directly from slides, which were sharp and with great color, but also expensive and again, only done by certain custom labs.
*‘Specialized development’ meaning more involved than EK, and more of a pain in the ass, so few commercial labs were willing to undertake it. It may have also required a special license from Kodak as well, but I’m not sure.)
Yes, they are such an accurate historical record. It really is true that in the early 1940’s American women wore perfectly clean blouses colour matched to their surroundings, coming to work after having their hair and makeup done, and had perfectly clean hands, and worked under direct mood lighting, perfectly posed, while building engines and aircraft during a war.
That’s what life was like. Overalls, grime, harsh factory lighting, tiredness etc didn’t exist back then. Life was like a bunch of models in a Sears catalogue. No, really, that’s what it was like.
It isn’t about b&w vs colour, it’s about posed vs unposed.
And there are unposed or at least only slightly posed colour photographs from the 1940’s
http://hughwilliamson.hubpages.com/hub/Rural-Life-Photos-in-1940-IN-COLOR
And that was just a few seconds of googling, I’m sure there are more and better.