what really leaps out at you (about old photos of people):
-bad teeth-in the 1890’s, people lost most of their teeth by age 50
-no fat people. obesity was rare, because fast food wasn’t around-people were hungry most of the time, and heavily sugared processed food were not around.
-formal dress-even working class guys wore suits and ties a lot of the time.
-not a lot of very old people-but of course, people in the 1800s were old at age 50.
It’s the latter.
Strobes are essentially instant, to the point that when doing serious flash work you have to take into consideration two separate exposures: the slowly accumulated ambient light and the instant flash burst.
This means that, in general, flash photographers cannot use shutter speeds higher than the camera’s “sync speed”—beyond that speed the shutter ceases to fully open and begins to function as a narrower and narrower slit moving down the frame. The instant flash captures an unwanted view of two shutter blades in mid flight.
My Fuji cameras cannot use flash with any shutter speed faster than 1/180s. This has little to do with capturing enough light and everything to do with having the full frame wide open for one instant.
Here’s the Slo-mo Guys showing SLR camera shutters in operation, filming the process at 10,000 frames per second.
Of course, she doesn’t have that problem. She can open the shutter wide for a few seconds and still get no visible exposure from the ambient light–she pops those sun-like flashes and that gives full crisp exposure in a millisecond.
True for strobes, but flash powder and long duration (focal plane) bulbs don’t have guite the action stopping power of electronic flash.
Those pics illustrate very well a point I made up thread several years ago about depth of field. The eyes are always in focus, but the tip of the nose is not, nor are the ears. One actor (perhaps Kevin Bacon?) has his hand to his face, and you can see one finger is in focus, but the finger next to it but slightly further from the camera is not.
Musicat made a point earlier that depth of field is affected by the aperture chosen -the wider the aperture (ie, the lower the f-stop number), the narrower the depth of field, leading to the issues which appear in the photos linked by Rainy. Musicat’s point is true, but I think that modern lenses with their complex arrangement of elements reduce the magnitude of the effect. A related issue is the slowness of the film (which to an extent dictates the aperture size chosen, from which the depth of field issue emerges). Fast modern film helps eliminate depth of field issues.
But to my eye, it is very much this issue which gives the old look to old photos, as much as teeth, hair, skin, fashion, etc.
On a slightly different note, posters have mentioned how modern orthodontically perfect teeth on actors playing historical roles pulls the viewer out of the moment.
I recently saw some reconstructions of WW1 moments with modern actors, where they had gone to the trouble of reproducing the bad teeth. It was just as jarring. I think the problem is not just one component, but getting everything to coordinate. Teeth, yes, but also shallowness of skin, boniness of body, imperfect hairstyling (even if the hairstyle was historically accurate, it was too perfectly executed to belong to a soldier in a trench at Gallipoli), and a certain looseness of manner that is very modern in a way that is not reflected in the bearing and general carriage of very old people. That is not to say people were always formal a century ago, but their informality is not our informality.
Acting and production values are hard.
Neither of which were used by Victoria Will at Sundance—she used studio strobes. I think that’s why I like her work so much: combining the old and the new to create beautiful tintypes in a relatively short time.
I wouldn’t say that narrow or deep depth of field is a consequence of modern times: Photographers usually choose either a specific aperture or specific shutter speed for artistic reasons and then the other is adjusted to get exposure right. In some circumstances, a modern camera might have too much light for a wide aperture, but the photographer will then dial down ISO as low as possible and possibly screw on a neutral density filter to knock the brightness down enough for the desired wide aperture.
Modern cameras are quite capable of producing amazing blurred backgrounds (bokeh), as long as you have enough cash in your toy fund. Perhaps the most accessible wide-aperture lens would be the “Nifty Fifty” that many people use, a f/1.8 50mm lens that both Nikon and Canon make. Put in the right circumstances, a lens like that can create pretty nice blurred backgrounds.
If you are truly looking for one eye in focus and everything else blurred, you are probably going to be working with popular portraiture lenses. A good portrait lens would be >85mm or so (in film terms) and have an aperture of f/1.4 or wider. Such a lens forces you to step far enough away from your model that their features are not distorted, while at the same time providing beautiful thin depth of field.
Depth of field depends not only on aperture, as discussed by Musicat, but also on the design of the lens and the size of the sensor. The lens design is important because manufacturers add dozens of corrections and tradeoffs to their lenses and make choices that affect the appearance of the blurred background artifacts. The sensor size, however, is likely the reason for olde-timey photos having such narrow DOF: depth-of-field is inversely proportional to sensor size, so as the sensor gets larger, the DOF becomes thinner. This is very easy to see when comparing APS-C sensors with full frame 35mm sensors with similar lenses: the full frame sensors have the better background-blurring.
Here is a site that shows a photo taken with equivalent lenses but different sensor sizes. The full frame sensor has the nicer blurred background.
If the larger rectangles in this chart cause better DOF, then wouldn’t a huge massive piece of glass blow them all out of the water in the depth-of-field game? A medium-format camera has a “sensor” that is many times larger than even a full frame 35mm camera’s sensor.
Regarding lens design, as an exaggerated example, those super telephoto mirror lenses make absolutely terrible backgrounds at wider apertures: the highlights turn into ugly doughnuts. Normally people don’t use mirror lenses for this kind of work.
But they do care about the designer’s approach toward how objects defocus as they are closer vs. as they are further from the focus plane. There are deep religious debates about lenses and their perceived “bokeh”
A recent kickstarter project was started for producing Petzval lenses, a lens design from the mid 1800s that gives yet another look to photos, even more olde-timey. Take a look at the Petzval lens photos in this gallery for an idea of what this looks like.
Where did I ever say otherwise?
Simply pointing out that earlier photographers had different tools. I liked the linked pics.
I just figured it out. After posting this thread in 2003, he used the next seven years to create Instagram and become a billionaire!
Yes, about equipment or method. Recently I saw an article about a photographer who took tintype photos of a bunch of celebrities at Sundance. Even though they’re wearing contemporary clothing and otherwise have current styling, some of them somehow look “old timey” in the face. It’s not just that they are black and white, it seems that maybe the tintype aspect has something to do with it. Here’s some of the photos I mean.
Oops! I didn’t see this before I posted a different link to this same photographer’s work! It is fascinating.
One thing specifically with cars is that old cars used to be much, much less shiny. The modern clear coat processes that allowed you to keep your car nice and shiny by just washing it didn’t really become common until the 1980’s. So one thing that I think really stands out especially in color photos of street scenes from the 40’s through 70’s is how dull the paint on the cars looks. When someone tries to take a picture of an old car today and make it look old with photo filters and such, the paint is always a giveaway because cars from that period that are still around today are collector’s items that either get waxed constantly or have long since been repainted with modern clear coat processes.
With movies set in that period, you have the same issue with the paint but also with the types of cars you see on the streets. What the filmmakers usually do is put out a call for local collectors that have cars from the time they’re trying to portray and while they usually try to make sure it’s not all just muscle cars and luxury stuff, there simply aren’t a whole lot of old economy cars around.
People were physically smaller as well. I recently saw an exhibit of Civil war uniforms-they looked like they were made for boys. Nutrition (in childhood) wasn’t very good back then.
i wonder if the US Army purchasing dept. kept records of clothing sizes ordered-it would show the increase in body heights over the years.