VOLUNTEER NEWS
The following individuals have graciously offered their services as reference volunteers: Jim Dowdy, June Hartel, Peggy Wright, Mary Lou Thompson, Denise Thompson, Tom Beall, and Lloyd Grabill. They have gone through the training program and all are ready to help our patrons in the search room.
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this issue of the Bulldog was delayed one week. The last issue of 1996 will appear on December 16, and the first issue of 1997 on January 13.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND DIGITAL IMAGING
by Emily A. Murphy
In August, I went to Rochester, NY for a five-day conference on "Preserving Photographs in a Digital World" at the George Eastman House. It was an intense week, with sessions from 8:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. most days. The conference was fabulous, with lots of information about both traditional photography and digital imaging. It was designed for people who had worked with photographs but didn't know much of the terminology and the specific processes. It included an introduction to photographic processes and how to recognize and preserve them and the impact of digital imaging. About 1840 is usually given as the date of the invention of photography, and the earliest type of commercial photography is the daguerreotype -- an image printed directly on a tin or iron plate. There is no negative in this process, so a photographer could only get one image per sitting. Soon after came the ambrotype, a negative image printed on glass that would then be backed by a piece of metal painted black) and the tintype.
The earliest viable form of negative was the wet-plate collodion process, used by Civil War photographers such as Mathew Brady. The glass plate negative had to be coated with the light sensitive material, exposed in the camera, and developed before the coating dried. This meant that Brady, for example, had to have a darkroom set up on the battlefield. The invention of the dry-plate process later in the 19th century meant that one could carry sensitized negatives into the field and not have to develop them until later. However, the prints were made by the printing-out process, where the negative was put directly on the light-sensitive paper and exposed to sunlight.
Almost all modern black and white photography is a combination of the dry-plate collodion negatives (on a film base, instead of a glass plate) and developing out paper introduced around the turn of the century. Photographs of this type make up the vast majority of the collections of all of the participants.
In some ways, color photography presents minor problems, since it is a comparatively new technology and makes up a smaller portion of most collections. At the same time, it poses a much larger problem since the dyes that make a color photograph are inherently unstable and will fade whether in the dark or the light. Kodachrome seems to be the most stable of the color processes. The people at Eastman House believe that we are going to have a major problem in the next ten years as the color processes have a very short shelf life. The only way to really preserve color photographs is to keep them in a freezer between 0-10 degrees. However, because of the danger of condensation, the photographs must be properly protected before they are frozen. There is a great deal of research going on at the Eastman House and the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology to determine the best way to preserve color images.
We were introduced to digital imaging, scanners, computers, etc. and the difficulty of scanning a photograph: the tones from black to white are continuous, while a scanned image is made up of individual squares. We did hands-on work with digital scanning and digital cameras, as well as talking about the applications of this technology for such things as "repairing" damaged photographs and recreating colors in faded prints. People from Cornell University and the Library of Congress spoke on digital imaging initiatives in their institutions and some of the successes and failures they have had along the way.
All in all, it was a wonderful week, for I not only learned a lot about the history of photography, preservation concerns inherent in any photographic collection, and the good and bad points of digital imaging, but I also met people from Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Mexico, as well as just about every state in the U.S.
|
Tell Us What You Think About the Maryland State Archives Website!
|