1940: Photography

Two events of the year may be cited as evidence of the great popularity of photography with the public and the abiding faith of photographers in their hobby or profession. These were, first, the millions of persons who viewed the exhibits chosen from more than 50,000 photographs handled by the Photographic Society of America as the appointed sponsors of photography at the New York World's Fair; and, second, in spite of the war in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the fine exhibition staged by the Royal Photographic Society in September and October in London. In the words of the president of this latter organization, such an exhibition '. . . demonstrates clearly and unmistakingly the real position of photography as a living art that no alarums of war can quench.'

Amateur Photography.

Interest in photography at night has been increasing rapidly in recent years as a direct result of improvement in the quality and speed of photographic materials as well as the growing number of useful incandescent lamps that have been designed especially for photographic purposes. Small cameras with efficient shutters and fast lenses have encouraged the amateur to attempt photography under unusual conditions. Blue photoflash lamps were made available, for example, to be used as a supplement to daylight exposure with Kodachrome. Several new flashlight synchronizers were introduced, improved exposure meters were released, and a number of small developing outfits were marketed.

Compared with other years, only a limited number of new films were introduced. One of the most interesting was a direct positive panchromatic film for use in miniature cameras. After exposure in the usual way, the film was developed to a negative, bleached, cleared, and developed to a positive of extremely fine grain. The transparency so obtained could be projected or used to print a very fine-grain negative.

Another sensitized product that attracted considerable attention was a multiple contrast bromide paper. One type was introduced originally in England in May and two others were announced in the United States in August. With each of these papers, the degree of contrast is controlled by the use of blue or yellow filters, or combinations of them, in the printing light. Thus a single grade of paper may be used to make prints from negatives of different degrees of contrast.

Many amateurs were using various methods of toning for their exhibition prints, such as bluish-gray tones with sulfocyanide and gold, sepia tones with selenium, and dye tones with coupler developers.

Professional Photography.

A brisk demand grew up during the year from the leading portrait and commercial photographers for coated lenses. Such lenses have had their component surfaces treated with substances such as metallic fluorides, which form an extremely thin layer. An increase in light transmission results and the amount of inner reflection is reduced. Developments were reported also of lenses made from plastic materials, such as the 16-inch aspheric condenser of Lucite at the Kodak Research Laboratories for illuminating color transparencies when making color separation negatives.

A commercial model was introduced of an Edgerton condenser-discharge lamp for making ultra-rapid 'frozen motion' photographs. This new lamp utilizes a long-life gas-filled electrically operated flash tube, which gives extremely bright flashes of 1/30,000 second duration. A great advantage of this lamp is that it permits aperture settings to be used on the camera and spontaneous action can readily be recorded.

Another illuminant that was winning the approval of the portrait and commercial photographer was the fluorescent tube. Mercury vapor radiation is absorbed by a powder coating inside the tube which then emits visible light. Low current consumption, long life, and low temperatures of operation (about 120° F.) are features of these lamps.

A valuable method has been worked out for removing the last traces of hypo from photographic paper prints and thereby eliminating possible fading or yellowing of images resulting from subsequent decomposition of the hypo. The treatment consists in bathing the washed print in a peroxide-ammonia solution which changes the hypo to sodium sulfate, which is washed out easily. Fading of prints caused by external agents, such as coal gases, may be minimized greatly by another treatment whereby an extremely thin layer of gold is deposited on the silver grains when the print is bathed in a gold-sulfocyanide solution.

Nine subcommittees of the American Standards Association were working under the chairmanship of the Committee Z-38 on Standardization in the Field of Photography. The scope of these subcommittees covered the formulation of definitions, dimensional standards, recommended practices, and the establishment of methods for testing, rating, and classifying the performance characteristics of materials and devices used in photography, including its industrial applications but excluding cinematography.

Military and Aerial Photography.

Perhaps no phase of military service is more important in modern warfare than military photography. Men are trained with the aid of still photography and motion pictures and every military objective must be photographed before, during, and after an action takes place. Photography is also of value for influencing public opinion and for entertainment of the armed forces.

Very few pictures were released by censors of the invasion engagements in Holland, Belgium, and France although a number of remarkable photographs of the evacuation of Dunkerque were approved for general circulation. Reconnaissance planes usually carried cameras and the observer-navigator operated them. One officer of the Royal Flying Corps described these cameras as being box-shaped and heavily insulated against great changes in temperature and humidity. The cameras weighed about 28 pounds and were loaded with 55 feet of film capable of 125 exposures, each about 5 inches square. The lens was set at 'infinity' focus and the shutter electrically actuated. Arrangements provided for vertical pictures through an opening in the floor of the plane and for oblique exposures through a special window on the side. Dispatch runners delivered the cameras to the observer-navigator just before the take-off. The photographic ground staff set the shutter-speed and installed the correct filter, based on weather data.

With the use of infrared film, camouflage may sometimes be detected, and it is reported that color films were finding valuable uses for military photography. Many aerial operations were conducted at night and information was published of the use of large flash bombs timed to explode at the moment the camera shutter was open. Tests on the efficiency of these synchronizers were made in October at Rochester, New York, under the direction of Major Goddard of the U. S. Army Air Corps. Sufficient illumination was produced to permit the photography of an area five miles square.

Color Photography.

Each year an increase is noted in the number of persons who use color films, and this has been growing more rapidly since the introduction of cameras and projectors at moderate prices. The colorful exhibits and buildings at the New York World's Fair and the beautiful lighting effects at night were photographed on color film by thousands of people.

Quite a large number of professional photographers who make advertising copy for the leading manufacturers in this country have adopted sheet Kodachrome film in place of single-exposure three-color separation cameras. It is understood that photoengravers have learned how to make very satisfactory reproductions from such color transparencies.

Photomechanical Processes.

Several new films and plates for use for various types of process reproduction were announced during the year. Color correction of printing plates by manual methods was being replaced gradually by a masking system which corrects for imperfect printing colors. The use of fluorescent pigments for three-color separation work was demonstrated by Murray at the Photo Lithographers convention in Chicago. The first natural color news picture to appear in the news section of any Pacific Northwest newspaper was a photograph of the Lake Washington Pontoon Bridge which was printed in the Seattle Times of May 4, 1940. A printing rate of 38,000 copies per hour was used and no black printer image was employed.

Motion Pictures.

The longest feature color motion picture ever made, Gone With the Wind, was shown throughout the nation during the first half of the year. As an experiment, the projection equipment in twenty-five theaters showing this picture was fitted with special coated lenses which increased the light transmission from 15 to 30 per cent over that of an untreated lens. The musical production, Fantasia, which was produced by Walt Disney, had its initial public showing in New York in November. Work had been in progress on this unique combination of cartoon artist drawings and musical recordings for more than two years. Some of the best known classical music was recorded on 400,000 feet of film at Philadelphia under Stokowski's direction and animated drawings in color were used to dramatize it. The sound was played from a separate projector than that used for the picture and a film having four photographic sound tracks was employed. Loud speakers were located at selected points in the auditorium as well as in the standard position behind the screen.

Television.

Beach and garden scenes photographed on 16-mm. color film were transmitted by television to produce a 343-line image of a picture in color. A special demonstration was held in New York on Sept. 4 under the direction of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Reception of the image either in color or in black-and-white was possible depending on the type of receiver used. An investigation by a subcommittee of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers reported that normal film print characteristics were quite acceptable for all the different methods of television scanning. When the time arrives for commercial introduction of television, it is readily apparent that both 35-mm. and 16-mm. film will play a major part in this field. Improved television program service for the New York area was announced by the Radio Corporation of America in March and the initial steps were being taken to construct a television relay system for simultaneous service to and from other communities.

Applied and Scientific Photography.

Micro-filming of documentary material is becoming more extensive each year. Thousands of banks and commercial companies achieved greater protection of their records by copying them in reduced size on film. Engineering firms protected their files of drawings from possible destruction by fire and made them more accessible and more easily duplicated by photographing them on micro-film. The New York Public Library, for example, had photographed more than 130,000 pages of newspapers for their files. Vastly improved equipment had been brought out in recent years and the skill of the operators was greater. It was stated that 120 full letter pages could be copied per minute, or 20 newspaper pages containing over 150,000 words, or 10 complex engineering drawings — tasks which require from several hours to weeks by manual methods.

In the United States National Draft Lottery in October, all numbers were photographed immediately after they were drawn. Each number was dry-mounted on a form and when 250 numbers had been mounted, the form was photographed with a Micro-File Recordak. Next, enlarged prints were made from the micro-file negatives, and photo-offset plates from the enlargements were used for printing copies of the master list for distribution to the 6,175 local draft boards throughout the nation.

Photography is not usually thought of as a production tool except in the graphic arts trades, but in the design and production of aircraft it has become recently a most valuable means of saving time and costs and of elimination of errors. Engineering drawings are photographed with a large camera and then printed to a maximum size of 5 by 10 feet on aluminum sheets coated with a photographic emulsion or on coated surfaces such as linen, paper, wood, or plastic glass. Tool design and making have been speeded up greatly because drawings can be duplicated exactly as to any desired size and many copies made within a short time. A saving of more than $80,000 was effected in 1939 by the use of these methods at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland.

Photographs made with the electron microscope at the Kodak Research Laboratories have revealed for the first time the actual structure of silver grains in a photographic image. It was shown to be of a filamentary character rather than a coke-like mass as had been described theretofore. Extremely minute hair-like threads about 5 to 10 atoms thick were shown quite clearly with the apparatus which has the advantage over the optical microscope of great depth of focus as well as high resolving power.

A high-speed X-ray technique was developed at the Westinghouse Laboratories, which consisted of passing the discharge from a bank of condensers through a cold cathode X-ray tube. With the resulting surge of about one millionth of a second duration, it was possible to make X-ray photographs of objects moving at a high rate of speed, such as a football being kicked, a golf ball being struck by a golf club, and a bullet cutting its way through a wooden block.

Further applications of the X-ray radiographs were described as follows: the partially decomposed body of a man which was found in a refrigerator car near Rochester, N. Y., was identified as John Dunphy who had served in the U. S. Army for nine years from 1908 to 1917. Identification was possible chiefly through soft X-ray radiographs of the skin from the fingers, supplementing the usual finger-print impressions. The use of X-ray radiographs of pearls was accepted quite generally by leading jewelers as an accurate means of identifying natural, cultured, and synthetic pearls. Satisfactory radiographs were obtained at the Kodak Research Laboratories by using a special masking technique whereby scattered radiation was eliminated.