Friday, July 19, 2013

Shadows of shadows, shells of shells

Here they are, 116 format rolls I recently received from Oregon.
Agfa D6 rolls on the spools with wooden stem, bigger then the 120, nitrate-based (i.e. flammable).
All three -- exposed, and in dated boxes:
Early 30s. 80+ years.
The condition of both the rolls and boxes (and even the foil!) is very good.
I've seen very few really old rolls this good, and I have seen many.
For some reason, the old undeveloped rolls in cosmetic condition like this are usually really hard to pull pictures from.
My guess its because they always been stored indoors, never went through the cold winters.
Northern winter is preserving the latent image better then anything else.
Bears and Russians know this very well, and I am Russian:)
So these were just like I feared -- very good condition of backing paper and emulsion, unusual for nitrate-based rolls, very good response to development in tests, very high fog level, very low contrast, barely discernible images.
Changing developers, temperature etc helped very little:






...boy, smiling, girl with violin, smiling, house with stove, woman with child -- all in fog, more like the haunting visions, symbols, then the actual photographs.
The last frame has something like the grave stones in the midst:


fin.

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