[PRCo] Re: Films / Poland

Fri May 13 17:36:09 EDT 2011

Joseph Schneider Optische Werke was one of the few companies that survived and perhaps prospered in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik under communism and expanded afterward.   Unfortunately for most of you, the only good piece I could find is in German:

     http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos._Schneider_Optische_Werke

Regarding Microdol versus D-76 and other buffered borax developers:   Micrdol was a much later formula and proprietary.   It was never published.   It's flaw was that it dimished film speed by about a half stop or more.  So your Plus X 160 became 125.   Microdol also had just plain lousy keeping qualities ... it might last 30 days while D76 could last for years if replenished and tested and brought back up to strength.   

I usually tossed out my D76 and made a new gallon about once a year just on general principles.   But Donald Duke found tossing good chemistry a bother because he was using deep tanks in his darkroom.   His solution (no pun guys) was to have
Gerry Best come in one a month and run test films through his chemistry and then replenish it to bring it up to strength.  I swear Don kept it for years.  

Gerry Best was the same G. M. Best who wrote the railroad books.  If I understand the history correctly, he introduced sound motion pictures to the Warners around 1930.  In the 1950s, when, according the Gospel According to Uncle Donald Duke, the Warner's became afraid that TV would kill the market, they fired all the gentiles.  Best found a new home with the Walter Disney.    Best was apparently quite a photo chemistry expert and a rail historian.   He created a fabulous soup for removing stains from negatives that I still use. 

But when those buffered borax formuae came around in the 1930s, there was no Microdol.  They were the only things you could use.   Unfortunately when my dad moved to a nursing home 20 years ago, all of the clippings he had saved from the 1930s that would have been nice to support what I'm saying 'bout the history were destroyed.   The thoughts on keeping properties are from personal experiences.

Fortunately I very seldom used black and white in 35mm.   My only regular processing customer was Bill Middleton and he only used 120 also.   So D76 was the preferred dope.   

________   

Apparently Jack's group is leaving for Poland.   He is not going because his wife is in a nursing home in New Jersey.   I just got a message from him last night and phone call from John Wilkins saying he is flying out.  

________

Signing off ... leaving with Ed and Janis Lybarger and wife for dinner.    

On May 13, 2011, at 2:15 PM, Dwight Long wrote:

> Fred
> 
> Leitz got most of the publicity with his Leicas but Zeiss made better lenses--so, BTW, did a company called Schneider.
> 
> D76 was a very good developer for 120 or 116 size roll film, or for sheet film of same or larger sizes.  It was not so good for 35 MM.  Microdol produced a much finer grain and was preferred (at least by me after some adverse experiences in developing 35mm B&W with other developers) for 35mm.
> 
> Travels next year?  Could you persuade Jack May to defer his now-postponed Polish trip to next year and then all of us could go together?  I can't do anything lengthy the rest of the year, but next year is another story. A month is out of the question for me even then but two weeks is possible.  Not enough I haven't done in Italia to interest me and France can wait--possibly forever.  Poland, the smaller cities in Hungary and Czecho plus Poland, and even a return trip to Romania, are of much greater interest to me.  On the other hand, so many new lines have opened in Spain (including main line HSR) that a return visit there would hold some attraction.  One wonders what Thomas Fischer might have on his reduced plate of offerings for next year.
> 
> I'll be off line until Wednesday--but then again so will you for most of the time!
> 
> Dwight
> 
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: Fred Schneider 
>  To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org 
>  Sent: Thursday, 12 May, 2011 17:14
>  Subject: [PRCo] Films
> 
> 
>  I think the Ansco products were very bad when you stacked them against Kodachrome.   We all know that Kodachrome had extreme dye logevity, particularly dark storage.   Compared to E4 Ektachrome, the Anscochrome probably held up better.   I have a few slides that my father took in the early 1950s on Anscocolor that lasted longer than Ektachrome E4 process from 1960.   The anecdotes were probably Ansco versus Kodachrome.   
>  At one time Lancaster city had four camera stores and one was an Ansco dealer.   Even he admitted that it was difficult to sell the Blue and Red boxes.   He said, "The yellow box sells."   But both of them had similar black and white papers and chemistry.   They all, for example, developed buffered borax developers in the 1930s for moderately fine grain work.   Why?   Because Ernst Leitz and others were developing miniature cameras to use motion picture size film (35mm) in casettes and we needed something to get a little more detail out of the negatives.    Agfa Ansco's formula book called their's Developer number 17.   Kodak called their's D-76.   They were essentially the same thing.  i imagine if I could find a Dupont or a Gevaert formula book, I would find a similar product.   In time everything in this country disappeared except for Kodak and imports from Germany or Japan.   
> 
>  On the subject of black and white, it has been about 13 years since I last exposed and processed a roll of film.  The last roll I took was when I was asked to come to my 40th high school reunion with a camera.   We are now up to 53 years.   I've printed black and white negatives within the last month but I have not exposed any.   
> 
>  Preferred?   I used Kodachrome until it became obvious to me that it wasn't going to survive and then I switched to Fuji Astia about two or three years before the final demise of the Kodak product.   I still have some unexposed Kodachrome if anyone wants to make a remember when display.   Use depends on how many trips I take in a year.  Last year I didn't even use an entire brick of film.  This year I'm thinking of driving to Salt Lake City for the August 7th opening of the two light rail lines ... might use up 10 rolls on that trip.   I think we got wiped out of the Japan trip but now several of us are talking a month in either France or Italy next year and that ought to be good for 20 or so rolls of slides.   I will probably take both slides and digital.   
> 
>  Finally bought a Nikon D-90 a few years ago.   The uncredited photo of 4398 in a recent trains magazine was taken by me with the D-90.   I also bought a Canon printer a few months ago but it still sits here unconnected.   One of these days I'll wire it in and make some prints.  
> 
>  There just seem to be so many other things that get in the way ... painting the kitchen ceiling, trips, naps.  
> 
> 
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