When did color film become available?

[Anonymous]

Timz is correct about Kodachome being ASA 10 in the 1950s.  When I married my first wife in 1949, she had an Argus C3, a rather nifty camera at that time.  She used cheap film, Agfa would fade as did Ansco, but Kodachrome was the choice if you had the money.  IIRC, Kodacolor was faster but not as faithful in recording the true color.

I have a color photograph of myself that my older brother took when I got out of Boot Camp in 1945.  Don't know what he used but the colors have faded some, but not as bad as my wife's early shots.

Art

[timz]

I'm guessing Kodachrome was ASA 10 by the 1950s if not before. As I recall many of those Cushman pics include the exposure used, which would help confirm that.

[steamtoys]

Color film, as well as being more expensive, was much slower than B&W.  In the '50s, Kodachrome was ASA 5, much too slow for action still photography but OK as a movie film.  Over the years it was "speeded" up to a blistering ASA25.

[majorjkg]

Another problem with early color film is that it was very slow, maybe ASA 10!

[Firelei]

I know my mother was using 8mm color film during the period of 1946.  The film was still in excellent condition in 1987.  I was five at the time and I do not recall any earlier period for color film.

[jeremygharrison]

A comment I've heard about early (1930's) colour film was that rolls were individually speed rated - you got a note with each to say whether it was one or two (or if you were very lucky you might get four) ASA - and with that sort of film speed, taking pictures of a moving train, or on a non-sunny day, tended to the impossible.

Jeremy

[M636C]

erikem

I believe you are referring to Autochrome, which used a bunch of colored starch grains as the filter for the exposure and viewing. 

I've seen photos of World War I taken using this process.

These include photos of Temple Mount in Jerusalem taken by Australian troops after its capture with the assistance of T.E. Lawrence, and photos from the trenches in France showing French aircraft and soldiers (presumably on leave in dress uniform).

While I'd be unhappy with that colour from a current Digital SLR, the colour was excellent considering the process. Most of the pictures are digital copies but a few originals were on display.

The photos of Jerusalem showed quite reasonable colours compared to more recent photos of the same scene (I haven't been there myself).

M636C

[erikem]

Victrola1

Another color system was available in the early 20th Century. I believe the term starch plate was used to describe the process. The National Geographic ran images from this process in the 1920's and perhaps earlier. The color was not accurate, but strongly hinted at what it was supposed to be.

 

I believe you are referring to Autochrome, which used a bunch of colored starch grains as the filter for the exposure and viewing. 

[steveiow]

Here in the UK colour film became generally available in the mid to late 30's,mostly Kodak and Dufaycolour which I believe my have had some association with Ilford.Quite a lot exists from pre-war days,but the film was apparently very much hit and miss,most of our reknown railway photographers of the period remained with black and white-some until they died years later.

Even after the war colour was not used to a great extent because of the price (don't forget,this country was nearly bankrupt,certain things were still rationed until 1956) and also none of the magazines used colour photo's until the early 60's and then only on the cover,

Cheap colour film was available by the early 60's in the form of Ilford and Agfa my Dad tried it ,but a lot of the slides have faded,even after being kept in the boxes they came back from the developers in.The Kodak ones have kept their colour but as Dad said they were a lot dearer.

A company called Colour-Rail exists here in the UK,and it's owner, Ron White has managed to track down most of the real old stuff available-he even has a shot of Coronation at the Chicago 1940 fair,one of the few of this class of loco in that particular colour-he may have got that from someone over your side of the water,I'm not sure.

Steve

[Phoebe Vet]

Yes it can.  & I do have Photoshop.  I can increase the contrast, saturation, and color of those faded negatives.  I can even colorize images that were originally shot in B&W.

[daveklepper]

But digital technology can help in restoring color balance and contrast to faded color photographs, slides or prints.  I do not have photoshop, but I find I can use Paint and Photo Editor in combination, not only on my XP, but even on my older 92nd Ed. to make old photos usable.  Took me a while to learn how to do it, though!

[Phoebe Vet]

You are storing digital files on memory cards?  Bad idea.  Don't store anything important long term in memory cards.  Hard drives are good for a while, but I'm not big on putting all your eggs in one basket.

Digital prints will last as long as photographic prints and negatives if they were made recently with photographic quality media.  Great strides have been made in achievability of print media, but not all printers can use the newer archival inks and dyes, and not all printing paper is archival quality.  You will always be able to look at prints without a computer or reader.  If you are not printing your images you are asking for trouble.  Recordable CDs and DVDs will not last as long as a properly stored negative and the technology will continue to evolve.  The day will eventually come when there is no longer a device capable of reading them.  You can, of course, keep copying them to the newer and improved media as it evolves.  Digital movies are a much greater risk for the same reasons.  The advantage of digital is that there is no significant expense involved in making the original image.  You can shoot a thousand pictures of your event if you like.  I would, however, make prints of a few of the best and put them in acid free archival storage then make slide shows to watch on your TV or whatever with the entire shoot for your current needs.  I would make the same argument about digital frames.  They are OK for current display, but have no archival capability. 

[Victrola1]

Another color system was available in the early 20th Century. I believe the term starch plate was used to describe the process. The National Geographic ran images from this process in the 1920's and perhaps earlier. The color was not accurate, but strongly hinted at what it was supposed to be. Anscochrome was an interesting beast for the hobbyist nearly 40 years ago. E-4 Extachrome for home process meant shoot a lot of film before mixing the reagents. It oxidized quickly. GAF made a kitchen sink kit that did 4 rolls. Digital is not nirvana for archival purposes. "I found a bunch of 4X5 negatives my grandfather shot of steam," still means something usable. In 80 years, who will have a machine to play memory cards? That is, assuming the plastic case has not cracked.

[Phoebe Vet]

Yes, the three plates method of color goes back the somewhere around 1860.

Color FILM was not patented until 1932.

[dredmann]

The technique of making a color image by using in succession three color filters over monochrome film is quite old. However, I wouldn't call that color film. Obviously it would not work for a moving train.

 

[wanswheel]

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) combined 3 photographs on plates tinted a primary color to produce these pictures of czarist Russia.

Tracks http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20000/20016v.jpg

Yard http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20500/20533v.jpg

Building http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20400/20455v.jpg

Bridge http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20300/20338v.jpg

Train http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20200/20246v.jpg

Car http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20300/20398v.jpg

Tower http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20500/20548v.jpg

Town http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/21400/21424v.jpg

Flatcars http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20300/20314v.jpg

Boxcars http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20200/20277v.jpg

Handcar http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20200/20245v.jpg

Locomotive http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/prokc/20400/20458v.jpg

[AltonFan]

wjstix

Remember too that in railfanning, mags like Railroad or Trains were pretty much all B&W into maybe the 1960's. So if you took a color slide of something in the thirties, it probably wouldn't be publishable, or if it was published, it would be a B&W version.

I still remember old copies of model railroad magazines that advertised "now 8 color pages" as late as the early 1970s.

Jim Boyd in an afterword to Don Ball, Jr.'s America's Colorful Railroads, gives a synopsis of color photography by railfans.  Ball himself had some observations on the early days of color photography.  According to these writers, color slides were only in demand for the occasional magazine cover, while B&W prints were desired for trading and most publication. 

[timz]

Lots more 1940s-50s slides, presumably Kodachrome

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/

[artpeterson]

Hi - Kodachrome was commercially available from 1936, but before 1939 the colors were not stable.  Have a few pre-1939 Kodachromes that have shifted in color and faded, as well.  Post-1939, the Kodachromes are gorgeous and have not faded one iota in the interim!  Keep in mind in the early days it was a very slow film, so really only good for a stopped car or train and anything in shadows tended to go nearly completely black.

You asked about Kodacolors, those negatives were not stable and in the pre-Photo Shop era, the best you could hope for was a B&W print off the negs.  Someone who's more experienced with Photo Shop would have to weigh in as to whether or not a color image can still be salvaged from those negs.

Another color film that was around in the late 30s was Dufay Color.  In the UK, its reknowned for having most accurately reproduced the colors of the pre-Nationalization RRs.  Not sure when Dufay disappeared.  The couple of slides I have on that film are pre-1940 images.

Sadly, early Anscos faded horribly.  By early I'm thinking of the immediate postwar era, which are the oldest Anscos I've got.  Can't quite bear to throw them away, but sure wish they'd been shot on Kodachrome!  As an aside, have two shots of a crew posing with a BCER train on a 1947 fantrip.  One was shot on Anscochrome (its useless today), the other on Kodachrome (can still make a fine color print off it).

Hope this helps!  Art

[henry6]

No.. but knew quite a few who were from when I first arrived in Oct 1965 to the end.

[wjstix]

I have RR books with color pics from the mid-thirties. Good quality / long lasting slide film came along around that time. Color movie film was available in the thirties too. Color film was widely available but the film was very expensive...forget the exact price but you could get several rolls of B&W film for the price of one roll of color. It's a little like video...color video cameras were around in the seventies, but there's very little railfan video from that time because the cameras were so expensive that generally only TV stations could afford them - and many of them used film for remote news stories into the 1980's.

Many professional and amateur photographers preferred B&W because they could do the processing / printing etc. themselves, using filters and such to get just the look they wanted, whereas color print or slide film had to be sent off to be developed. Photography and home film developing was apparently a fairly common hobby back then; in the '30's my Dad was a teenager and he had a camera and a home darkroom.

Remember too that in railfanning, mags like Railroad or Trains were pretty much all B&W into maybe the 1960's. So if you took a color slide of something in the thirties, it probably wouldn't be publishable, or if it was published, it would be a B&W version.

BTW just a side note - color photography was developed (no pun intended) by a guy in Connecticut early in the twentieth century. His next door neighbor was Sam Clemens / Mark Twain. The guy made test pictures around his house using family members and friends as models, so some of the earliest color photographs made were of Mark Twain.

[Phoebe Vet]

Henry:

Were you by any chance an employee of GAF there in Binghamton?

[henry6]

While Kodachrome did hold up better than most, color photography in slides and prints do suffer great amounts of fading of some kind unless having been professionally protected.  An interesting thing about ANSCOCHROME was that it was lighter and more natural in color and appears not to have faded as much as the enriched colors of Kodak...at least in my slide collection.

[timz]

We've all seen Kodachrome slides from ... the 1940s, anyway, that looked just fine-- no obvious fading. (Lots of them at www.shorpy.com .) The faded pics we've also seen from 1950s-1960s were Ektachrome and Anscochrome and suchlike.  No idea how well Kodacolor negatives stand up. When did Kodacolor come out, anyway?

Basic sunny-day exposure for Kodachrome was around 1/200 at f/3.5. If all you're interested in is broadside pics of steam locomotives, might as well stick with black and white.

[henry6]

Considerably...yes.  And the camera's were a little more expensive, too. A 25 cent roll of film in a 10 dollar Brownie or other box was all it took, develop for a buck or two and probably get a free roll of film from a mail in lab.  Good, lasting color, yes, didn't come about until much later, like late 70's as faster films with broader color cama about. as Phoebe Vet siad.  Kodak was the most common film although there was ANSCO (American made) and some AGFA Gaevert (German) and much later FUJI (Japan)..  I've got to say I had enjoy the pictures I took with an Argus C3 and Kodachrome 25 in the late 60's and early 70's much more than what I have been able to do since.

[Phoebe Vet]

Color film was patented in 1932 by the Eastman Kodak Company.  Color film did not exhibit much color stability over time until about 1970.  Professional photographers preferred to shoot B&W and hand color portraits because color film shifted toward magenta when exposed to light for any significant length of time.  Look at your old family color pictures to see what I am describing.

Images shot for the press, or for archival purposes would have been shot in B&W.

[081552]

When did color film for consumers become available? I’m interested in electric traction and I don’t see color photos before 1939-1940? Was the early film considerably more expensive than B&W?