Why do some old timey photos have a sepia tone, but other photos printed at the same time are “normal” B/W? Just a different process?
Probably a filter over the camera lens, I would think. That’s how it was done in Nosferatu, which my wife and I researched for our movie discussion group. They changed the filter to express different emotions in different scenes.
Because they were processed and developed in two distinct ways - one with the help of a cuttlefish and one without.
From this Wiki article:
“It was originally produced by adding a pigment made from the Sepia cuttlefish to the positive print of a photograph taken with any number of negative processes. The chemical process involved converts any remaining metallic silver to a sulphide which is much more resistant to breakdown over time. This is why many “old time” photographs are sepia toned—those are the ones that have survived until today.”
So if I’m reading that right, it was done to preserve the image? Where did we get the tradition of doing it for artistic purposes? Why is it considered artistic?
I ask this in a confused way, cause I do think it looks good in certain examples, but I don’t know why!
A filter wouldn’t affect a black-and-white image in this manner as, well, the film is black-and-white.
Another common toning technique for preservation is selenium toning.
The Wiki entry and other sources tell us that this particular way of processing the image gave a longer-lasting print, one less-resistant to fading over time. As photographic technology progressed, of course, the addition of sepia became unnecessary, and we were able to produce stable, long-lasting b/w prints and, eventually, stable colour prints too.
So you arrive at the era of modern photography, where the sepia tint is associated with a byegone era, and with the earliest days of pioneering photography. This gives it a cultural value. Today, even though it is no longer serving a functional purpose, the ‘sepia tint’ image conveys a sense of history, of nostalgia, and some people find it an attractive way to present certain images because of this connotation with the past.
It started out as a functional additive. Now it’s an aesthetic option.
If you’re reverse processing the film (no negative stage, you go straight to positive) and you do a chemical reexposure (as opposed to an actual reexposure using a light bulb, modern T-max chemistry notwithstanding) you’ll get a sepia toned image.