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Tintypes don’t record light the same way we’re used to film doing. The emulsions were markedly different– up until I think about the 1940s-50s black and white film didn’t respond to red light at all, and just recorded it as black. No, later than that– if you’ve seen the picture set going around of the Addams Family set, in color, it was all shades of pink and black because red would’ve just blended in with the black!
Which partly makes my point. If you take a photo with a modern camera and a “mid-1800s camera lens!!” and then use a modern Instagram or Photoshop filter to convert it to monochrome, it’s going to do so based on a totally different set of criteria than what was used to actually record images in monochrome when that was the state of the art technology.
And in the case of those photos I was ranting about, sepia-tint– that’s almost entirely what people use as shorthand for “old-fashioned”, but sepia wasn’t particularly popular at any point in history, it’s just that monochrome images on old media that yellows, like paper, are going to look sepia-toned. They’re not. Ambrotypes, cyanotypes– they were all artifacts of using different media to capture monotones.
And they’re all much different than just going into Photoshop and going image–>mode–>grayscale.
I’m not saying that modern digital-based photographers don’t work their asses off, both in setting up and capturing actual images, and in post-processing them afterward. The amount of work necessary hasn’t really gone down because the bar has been raised– you used to hand over a wedding album of like 100 prints after a professional job, having exposed probably 150-250 images in total during the actual event, but nowadays it’s routine to give a bride 500-1000 proofs for her to choose which 100 to bind into an album (and those 1000, you’ve winnowed down from the probably 3000 you took). (and yes it’s almost always the bride)
But it’s just different, and while there’s no real harm in artistically evoking the mystique of a bygone era by making an image take on the appearance of having been taken with now-defunct technology, it’s really not at all the same as having used said technology to actually expose an image.
And this is why, to conclude on a hopeful note, many high schools still teach their smartphone-wielding teenagers black-and-white film photography, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to source the materials and chemistry. Because nothing makes you really understand a medium better than learning the limitations it has expanded beyond.
Tintypes don’t record light the same way we’re used to film doing. The emulsions were markedly different– up until I think about the 1940s-50s black and white film didn’t respond to red light at all, and just recorded it as black. No, later than that– if you’ve seen the picture set going around of the Addams Family set, in color, it was all shades of pink and black because red would’ve just blended in with the black!
Which partly makes my point. If you take a photo with a modern camera and a “mid-1800s camera lens!!” and then use a modern Instagram or Photoshop filter to convert it to monochrome, it’s going to do so based on a totally different set of criteria than what was used to actually record images in monochrome when that was the state of the art technology.
And in the case of those photos I was ranting about, sepia-tint– that’s almost entirely what people use as shorthand for “old-fashioned”, but sepia wasn’t particularly popular at any point in history, it’s just that monochrome images on old media that yellows, like paper, are going to look sepia-toned. They’re not. Ambrotypes, cyanotypes– they were all artifacts of using different media to capture monotones.
And they’re all much different than just going into Photoshop and going image–>mode–>grayscale.
I’m not saying that modern digital-based photographers don’t work their asses off, both in setting up and capturing actual images, and in post-processing them afterward. The amount of work necessary hasn’t really gone down because the bar has been raised– you used to hand over a wedding album of like 100 prints after a professional job, having exposed probably 150-250 images in total during the actual event, but nowadays it’s routine to give a bride 500-1000 proofs for her to choose which 100 to bind into an album (and those 1000, you’ve winnowed down from the probably 3000 you took). (and yes it’s almost always the bride)
But it’s just different, and while there’s no real harm in artistically evoking the mystique of a bygone era by making an image take on the appearance of having been taken with now-defunct technology, it’s really not at all the same as having used said technology to actually expose an image.
And this is why, to conclude on a hopeful note, many high schools still teach their smartphone-wielding teenagers black-and-white film photography, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to source the materials and chemistry. Because nothing makes you really understand a medium better than learning the limitations it has expanded beyond.
