There are a lot of factors that have changed since the fifties. Film and paper of course as you have mentioned. Optics, lenses are very much crisper now. Lighting, in the fifties it was mostly hot lights and flash bulbs though a few were using big strobes which even so give a far different look to a shot than the small auto-strobes we use today. Printing was done differently, used smaller apertures longer exposures. The chemicals were in many cases different, even when they had the same brand name as the modern ones. Developing temperatures were lower 68 degrees was the standard. And beyond those everything was done by hand, so the precision was not the same, developing 35mm was a tense thing, larger formats far less so.
BTW, as far as I know Super XX was never available in 35mm so that look does not match the techniques of the day. If you are shooting medium format you might try Kodak Verichrome Pan. I believe it is still available in 120, or at least was a very few years ago, and still has the same kind of spectral sensitivity that it did back then, though I imagine the grain is finer. Ciao, graywolf ----- Original Message ----- From: Shel Belinkoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 11:34 PM Subject: Re: Mid 20th century look (was Re[2]: 50mm/f1.2 > Hi ... I appreciate your offer to help, but I can't really explain > exactly what I'm looking for. There's no particular photographer or > style that I have in mind. It's just something I'm going to have to > work out myself. > > However, if you know of any films that will give results like XX, or > papers that are similar to the fiber-based paper used by Eugene Smith, > I'd like to know about them. As I told Bob, I've been playing around > with Bergger 200 and Fortepan, some variations with Tri-X, and have just > started looking for an appropriate, graded, fiber-based paper. - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
