Ortho vs. Pan - examples?

[M like Leica M6]

Sometimes I like the old look of ancient photographs... and for a new project I need to create a 1950 sort of look.

So I went to a thrift store to find some old clothes and stole a Lincoln Cosmopolitan Convertible from a car museum, and my daily exercise (Duck and Cover) will confuse all those communist spies 😀

Apart from that, a film with ancient characteristic might be a good idea to reproduce a 1950 look. There are some orthochromatic films available, but I never saw an example showing the difference between ortho and pan films in a portrait and a landscape.

Where can I find such an example? 😕

 

[Ade-oh]

Here's a recent picture of my daughter taken on Adox Ortho 25, with only a skylight filter. She is a fair-skinned blonde and it ha darkened the tone of her skin and put some interesting looking 'stains' on her teeth.

 

[mhv]

You can get a similar effect to ortho film by opening a colour photo in Photoshop, and selecting only the blue channel.
Ortho is mostly sensitive to blue not red.

Blue AND green.

A blue-sensitive emulsion is called "ordinary."

"Orthochromatic" means "correct colors" because once they found out how to sensitize silver halide to other colors than its inherent blue+UV sensibility, the colors were finally starting to look normal.

Here's a portrait on ortho film:

Here's a fire hydrant on ortho:

Here's a fire hydrant on an ordinary emulsion (Kodak 2302):

There is quite a difference between ortho and ordinary.

 

[M like Leica M6]

You're quite right.
Ortho is only insensitive to red, thus the darkening of skin tones, and freckles:

Oh, that's a good example - and a great, great, great photo.

So, I better take care if a girl has freckles and wants some nice photos for her boyfriend...😀

 

[Ade-oh]

Here's another example of Adox Ortho 25 in a daylight portrait. This was stand developed in Rodinal at 1+100 for about 70 minutes. As you can see, although the model has very good skin in real life, this film brings out every blemish and wrinkle, even when these are invisible to the naked eye: you can even see marks from her goggles where she'd been for a swim a couple of hours before the picture was taken.