I've been searching for year for an answer to this question.

[rdenney]

Actually, the softness at the edges of the first picture seems normal for lenses of the era used at wider apertures.

Rick "who thought the edges were decently sharp--for zero-enlargement contact prints" Denney

[Pawlowski6132]

When you post other people's images, you should include attribution. If the photographer is unknown, you should give your source.

Geez. Who cares.

[bigdog]

Originally Posted by Bill_1856
When you post other people's images, you should include attribution. If the photographer is unknown, you should give your source.

Geez. Who cares.

The owner of the photograph?

[Eric Rose]

Has anyone considered that the kid was added to the picture from another neg? Check the shadows of the plant stand to his right and his shoes.

[Jody_S]

From someone who started his working career as a computer programmer, doing graphics (assembly-language subroutines for C programs on PC-DOS OS computers, 1980s): a digital camera is not simply a classic camera with a sensor replacing a photo-sensitive layer of film. Digital cameras are computers, they are programmed with very sophisticated algorithms to translate the output of a sensor into whatever the manufacturer has decided a typical/ideal photo should look like. If you were able to look at the output of the sensor directly, unfiltered and unprocessed, it wouldn't be recognizable to you (I don't mean some BS about 'binary' either).

If you were to take all my work over the last 5 years or so, and view the photos 1 by 1 in some sort of gallery format, you would not easily be able to separate my 35mm from my 6x9cm from my 4x5in photos. Nor would you be able to separate my (not-i)-phone from my p&s from my dSLR photos. You would, however, easily separate the digital photos from the classic film photos. Even those on which I've done extensive editing. If you're an expert at this, once you've separated the work into film vs. digital, you might be able to recognize focal lengths and coated vs. uncoated optics (or distinguish between Canon and Nikon dSLRs based on flash/ambient balance), and from there separate into large format vs. small. I'm not so sure you could separate an image taken with a Leica/Summar from that taken with a LF/Tessar, unless something in the photo gives away the use of some LF-specific technique. The 1st image you posted (boy) is a good example of this, it could very well have been taken with a Leica, a 6x9 folder, a Press camera, or whatever.

My point is that the 'look' you are looking for isn't necessarily attributable to LF vs. anything else, as it is to photography guided/constrained by the physical characteristics of emulsion/lens/darkroom technique and almost every mistake is fatal, vs. photography where 90% of the 'work' is done by a computer programmer years before you press the shutter, and the results start from a position of uniformity or standardization, before you begin a process of personalization.

[sun of sand]

Is that ROL or LOL




conspiracy
this photo never happened!! If you look closely you can see the

[rdenney]

The differences visible here (since we are all viewing this picture on a computer monitor) are not a matter of digital versus film. That's a discussion of small effects, when the question being asked here is about large effects. These large effects can be explained by several factors:

1. The different depth of field when using the long lenses required by large format, and

2. The way in which ancient lenses might render the image, for a variety of reasons, and

3. The way in which scenes like this were illuminated, both for daily use and for photography, 100 years ago.

Yes, the films of those days were different, but not that different. It would not be hard to make a digital image look like the original image to the level that can be discerned in a file attached to a post in this forum. We are not comparing prints.

I linked a web page that shows images made with a Rapid Rectilinear adapted for a digital camera, and they show similar artifacts as the original image posted here, if one filters for the other large effects.

Rick "thinking a photo looking very much like what we see on our screens could be staged now using a digital camera, except that the photographer might be arrested for child abuse" Denney

[Jim Noel]

Thinking of the time during which this photograph was made a couple of assumptions can be made.
1. The film used was an orthochromatic emulsion which opened up the shadows in the image. Instead of film, it could well have been an orthochromatic dry plate. As far as a film curve is concerned, I doubt one can be found. Knowledge of characteristic curves was just becoming available and most photographers probably knew nothing of them.
2. The selective focus on the young boy was easily established using any one of the several portrait lenses of the time. A meniscus, a petzval, a Darlot or a Plastica come to mind. My first choice would be a Plastica.

The image from the DVD is not visible to me.

[rdenney]

Thinking of the time during which this photograph was made a couple of assumptions can be made.
1. The film used was an orthochromatic emulsion which opened up the shadows in the image. Instead of film, it could well have been an orthochromatic dry plate. As far as a film curve is concerned, I doubt one can be found. Knowledge of characteristic curves was just becoming available and most photographers probably knew nothing of them.
2. The selective focus on the young boy was easily established using any one of the several portrait lenses of the time. A meniscus, a petzval, a Darlot or a Plastica come to mind. My first choice would be a Plastica.

You're probably right about the film being orthochromatic, though I couldn't find any obvious clues. But panchromatic film was still pretty new (and it was expensive) in 1909.

If the factory was dusty or (more likely) smoky, the haze might have done as much to open up the shadows as blue northern window light. We take the haziness to be lens flare, but it might not be limited to that.

Based on my meager understanding of his history, Hine was probably not interested in such subtleties, and just used a popular lens of the day, which was apparently a Rapid Rectilinear. Hine's intentions seem to me more journalistic than artistic, and probably the rendering in the photo only seems unique compared to modern photographs, not compared to contemporary work in similar circumstances. Hine's interest seems like it must have been the circumstances being photographed, based on what I know of his work.

So, one technique to emulate the effect might be to use a blue filter. It won't be the same, but it will aim in the ortho direction.

Rick "never much of an ortho fan" Denney

[Richard Wasserman]

Hine often had to work quickly, and was not terribly interested in technique and his negatives were often poor. Also, don't forget that we are looking at modern scans, whether of prints or negatives we don't know. We also don't know what decisions were made in processing the images. The book on Hine that I recently received reproduces this same image differently—about a stop darker, among other things.