Are you old enough to remember?

[DownUnder]

My PhotoLab Index is green, and was last updated in 1955
It belonged to a friend of my grandfather, who passed it on to my uncle, who passed it on to me
Ethol LPD was my poison of choice for paper developer, it used to come in cans as well.

A true gold mine of data, most of it now obsolete. But huge. Full of interesting but sadly now largely irrelevant information.

Is or was available online as a download, if anyone cares to go looking for it. Google.

 

[DownUnder]

Agfachrome had beautiful color but like the early Fujichrome it faded quickly.

Ektachrome-X was my favorite 35mm color but Ektachrome Professionsl 120 had the most beautiful warm skin tones and spring greens. Properly processed and stored it still looks good but not all processing was equal. I have some that’s just red now. Very sad!

Kodachrome-X was asa 64 and had a salmon cast to skin tones. I liked Kodachrome II much better but due to having to send it to Atlanta for processing it made it difficult to use for work. Kodak occasionally screwed up processing too. I had one big job destroyed by them in Atlanta. At that point I pretty much stopped using Kodachrome.

KoFe Kodak stopped putting chemicals in cans in the late 70’s or early 80’s in the US. I’m wondering if your dealer had a lot of old stock.

Oddly, old Ektachrome scans better (on a Plustek 7600i) than Kodachrome. This may be due to my technical ignorance but I find it much easier to work with E6 films. I have the color scan chart somewhere in one of my boxes, someday it may turn up and I can then try to calibrate the Plustek. Being German of course nothing in the manual is simple, but when I've persevered, everything worked. So far so good.

At least my Kodachromes have never faded. As for Ektachrome, well, sigh. Ditto Fujichrome and especially Agfachrome tho I have some of the latter from the early 1970s, taken in Bali, almost as good as when I took them in 1972. A problem with Kodachromes processed in the USA in the '70s was some private labs weren't as careful as Eastman with quality control. Some of my slides from 1979 and 1982 are showing distinct color shifts, but even those are far from having faded to blank rectangles.

Kodachrome films in Canada and later in Australia (where I both lived, now in the latter, 50 years) were sold as process paid film. I recall coughing up AUD $5 for one 36 exposure roll and thinking how expensive that was. I also really buying process not paid K64 (as I recall the canisters were a different color) in the USA and sending it to Kodak in Melbourne for free processing as nobody in the Preston K-Lab bothered to check the films.

As happened to x-ray ,Kodak Australia screwed up one of my processing jobs, in 1986 or 1987. I sent ten rolls off to their lab in Melbourne but somehow the films were lost in transit. My employer (it was a work shoot) kicked up a fuss but thankfully let me reshoot. I used Fujichrome (the ISO 50 I think) and stayed with this film as it had suitably strong colors.

Now for a sequel to this story. Two years later I was in the Kodak shop in Melbourne and found my missing ten rolls of K64 had turned up, according to the staff about two weeks before. A mystery resolved but never solved. I did use Ektachrome after this, but I had it processed at the Vanbar lab, not by Kodak. That little episode quite put me off Kodak color films, tho' I went on using their superb B&W films until those got too expensive for me.

Now I've not bought a roll of slide film in almost two decades. I use my Nikon D700s and D800s and I think, ah, those GODs were enjoyable but now let us thank all the gods of the universe for D, life is much simpler and a helluva lot cheaper.

 

[MrFujicaman]

Was Versapan GAF's version of Verichrome Pan? And I wonder if Ilford's Selachrome was also a knock off of Verichrome Pan.

 

[EarlJam]

Here are a couple of Spiratone ads. The $39 fisheye was the one I bought around 1970.

The fisheye worked reasonably well for the price, at least the few times I used one. In retrospect, I kind of wish I had kept it.

 

[Godfrey]

I must confess I’ve been lazy. I haven’t been in the darkroom in a while so I went to my darkroom this evening to see what chemicals I have and retrieve my “Photo Lab Index”. I have a nice supply of raw chemicals to compound my own and thought it might be a chance to try something different.

While going through my chemical closet I ran across some relics of days gone by.

Are you old enough to remember chemicals in steel cans? 75 cents for a quart size Dektol?

Through the years I’ve also save rolls of film that have been discontinued. Do you remember Adox KB14 and KB17? How about 120 Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome-X? And there was Panatomic-X and old original TX with the king leader for your favorite Barnack.

Do you remember the Photo Lab Index? It was a subscription service and updates were sent out monthly. It basically contained all the data on all current film and paper emulsions as well as chemicals from every manufacturer. And no darkroom would have been complete without lab quality glass graduated cylinders, FR print tongs and film clips. Even darkrooms have almost become a thing of the past.

Post your memories and photos.

Do you have any relics of the past?

I am a relic of the past. ...

There's being old enough to remember. And being old enough to be happy to forget, or if not happy, to no longer care so much.

I remember all this stuff from the days of my first interests in photography. The tins of chemistry, the prices that seem almost absurd to us now, the Kodak Pocket Data Guides and Professional Data Guides, the films, the equipment, my old Omega enlarger that came down to me from my grandfather, father, and uncle... Half of the cameras I own and use today are the Kodak Retina IIc, IIIc, Voigtländer Vito II and Vitessa, Polaroid SX-70 that come from those years of my youth and teens as well.

The darkroom stuff: all gone but for the data guides. I still use them. I still use the cameras, if less all together than I do just one of the digital Ms. Or my iPhone for that matter.

Doesn't matter. The love is in the photos I made with them, that I make today. My friends' grand kids are adults now. And in their bright faces I see Time unfolding, expanding into the Past and the Future. The equipment is/was/will be great ... it is locked forever into its Time, static. What we do with it with our living eyes, mind, and heart ... that's the important part.

G
—
"No matter when you go, then you were."

 

[Dralowid]

Remember prints sticking to the glazing machine and the effort needed to clean it off afterwards?

 

[EarlJam]

On a related tangent . . . October 1961, (8 y/o) me with a typical B+W television camera; and January 1962, the first color TV camera in Los Angeles, at the NBC O&O (now KNBC). I'm pretty sure the camera pedestals came from a company called Houston-Fearless. Lighting direction at the time, particularly for the color cameras, was "turn them all on, and add more over there".

I've forgotten the resolution of the B+W camera; the color camera was nominally 525-line NTSC but rated at 280 lines. The engineers of that era would be astounded at what virtually all of us carry in our pockets today.

 

[DownUnder]

This undated article calls it "Spillman's Resofine 2B" and says it's available from Speedibrews. The author then provides formulas for a two-bath process, but the way it's written it's not clear if it's meant to be Spillman's.

HMECINE

It's also mentioned in this thread from 2007:

Resofine B-- has anyone used it.Is it like Diafine?

Following up on my thread about developer/film options for a b/w beginner.I was wondering if anyone has any experience with the 2 bath developer Resofine 2B.Available in the UK from Speedibrews via Silverprint etc. I can find a lot of info' on DIAFINE,but not a much on this one.I was wondering...

rangefinderforum.com

...and the formula is listed in this thread:

Resofine

Has anyone any thoughts on/experience with Resofine? In particular, what're the true speeds of HP5+ and FP5+ in it? Thanks!

www.photo.net

Solution A

Sodium Sulfite, 35 grams - Hydroquinone, 6 grams
Phenidone, 0.2 grams - Sodium Bisulfite, 6 grams
Water to make, 1 liter

Solution B
Sodium Sulfite, 65 grams - Sodium Metaborate, 20 grams
Or, Borax 20 grams, for results "like that of D76"
Water to make, 1 liter

Many thanks for this. My first thoughts are, it's a strong mix. Megadoses of metol and hydroquinone. I like my negatives on the soft side as they scan better on my Plustek and Epson. Very careful developing, temperature control would be absolute musts.

My 1960s memories are mostly sepia- now, but I don't remember Phenidone or sodium bisulfite in the Spillman brew. I recall it was an MQ mix. Not sure if Phenidone was available in eastern Canada in the '60s. My local camera store would have ordered it in, which usually took weeks or even months as they made bulk orders from their suppliers, not one-item requests.

Split D76 as posted by x-ray is, IRRC, closer to the Spillman formula.

I will do more research into this, meantimes these two developer will surely be worth trying. I have a few cans of bulk Kodak films in my fridge, waiting to be loaded into canisters and used before they completely decay (or I do).

 

[kshapero]

Early 80's we had a co-op darkroom in the basement of an art gallery. Lot's of Tri-X and chem, also lots of beer and pizza. A great time it was.

 

[Dogman]

Remember prints sticking to the glazing machine and the effort needed to clean it off afterwards?

I remember the chief photographer at our newspaper using RC paper the first time and feeding them onto the huge drum print drier and glazer. It took several hours to scape the remains off without scratching the drum face.


...................

 

[Retro-Grouch]

I remember the chief photographer at our newspaper using RC paper the first time and feeding them onto the huge drum print drier and glazer. It took several hours to scape the remains off without scratching the drum face.


...................

I worked in the Photo Dept. tool crib in college, which meant maintaining and monitoring the equipment. At least on a weekly basis, a newbie photo student would send some RC paper through the drum drier. All the signs and warning imaginable made no difference, and invariably they were upset that their prints were ruined! And of course, guess who got to clean the mess...

 

[CMur12]

Remember prints sticking to the glazing machine and the effort needed to clean it off afterwards?

Is the glazing machine/glazer the same as the ferrotype machine?

- Murray

 

[DownUnder]

I remember the chief photographer at our newspaper using RC paper the first time and feeding them onto the huge drum print drier and glazer. It took several hours to scape the remains off without scratching the drum face.


...................

That paper could have been Kodak Polycontrast F. The first version (I got into it in 1966 or 1967) was a crapper to work with, poor contrast, filtering problems, didn't dry properly and stuck to the ferrotypes we used then for drying. I had to throw out one such 'tin (ferrotype) and buy a new one after an entire sheet of prints stuck fast to it, fortunately those tins were inexpensive (< CDN $2) but it gave a lot of trouble and wasted time. Polycontrast Rapid F came out later and resolved most of the problems but still had issues with print contast.

After about a year and after I had my film contest under reasonable control, I returned to Kodabromide (later Kodabrom) and other fixed grade papers, to Agfa (Bravura was wonderful) in the '70s and Ilford Multigrade IV in the '80s. Back then business clients liked the Pearl/Textured finish on Ilford for their displays. Book and magazine publishers wanted Glossy. Ultimately when Ilford Galerie paper came along, I never looked back.

Let us not forget that some aspects of the GODs are fine to remember but not really worth reliving.

 

[phojsu]

What I miss most from those days was Kodak 2475 High Speed Recording Film. Sure there are faster films now with smaller grain today but prints made back then from grainy pushed 2475 negs just told everyone the scene was dim and at night. The world was simpler.

Kodak 2475 Recoeding Film, my best memories were not the obvious grain and associated texture, but the inherent curliness of the Estar-AH film base. Once cut in strips of 5 or 6 35mm frames to file away in plastic sheets, the whole sheet would curl.

Once cut in strips of 6, it was a challenge to get it into a Graphic negative carrier.