What's your favorite internet falsehood on photography?

[Alan Townsend]

After having been "away from photography" the last twenty years or so, I find much knowledge in this field has changed likely due to incomplete reporting or research that people do before posting articles on the internet.

What's your favorite (or most frustrating) falsehood(s) reported on photography?

Some of mine are:

1. Misunderstandings on the history of black and white film color sensitivity. So many think that the first films were orthochromatic, completely forgetting the color blind (blue sensitive) emulsions of early photography. Was it Vogel that first reported orthochromatic film sensitizers? Was this incomplete research or poor Google searches? Searches yield the most common, not the best or more complete information often.

2. Misunderstandings on what an emulsion is. So many videos and articles on alternate printing processes refer to the paper sensitizing solutions as emulsions even though they are water plus ionic solids only with no emulsifying agents. This may be a minor thing, but kind of irritating.

3. George Eastman was the inventor of roll film. I guess he was one of the inventors, but Hannibal Goodwin held the first patent, which was bought by Ansco, who sued Eastman Kodak for patent infringement on roll film and won the largest settlement in history at that time nearly 30 years after the invention. It was litigated that long. This is one of those little irritating historical things. Eastman and Goodwin both invented roll film at about the same time independently, but Goodwin filed a patent and Eastman did not. Goodwin was an elder preacher and amateur photographer of modest means while George Eastman was economically more successful. Goodwin died many years before the court case was settled.

This film resurgence thing is great, but we need to keep the internet fact-checkers employed. Please add to this your own list of mis-remembered parts of photo technology and history.

Alan Townsend

[Michael R]

Yikes. Where to begin. It would be a lot easier to list the things that aren't false.

[Pieter]

And this matters to...?

[Dugan]

William Mortensen was the Anti-Christ.

[Mark J]

Lead glass used by Zeiss gives more microcontrast and 3D-pop.

[Tin Can]

My hero!

I have his books

Working on single lamp next week


\\\

William Mortensen was the Anti-Christ.

[Alan Townsend]

My hero!

I have his books

Working on single lamp next week


\\\

When I was in high school, I remember reading "Mortenson on the Negative" in the public library where 4x5 was shown in the "medium format" category. I think a later edition changed that as films were improved. Good book for would be portraitists, as I recall.

PS: I started this thread due to your "greatest lie" thread, which I thought was itself an internet mis-truth.

[djdister]

William Mortensen was the Anti-Christ.

I've got his book "Projection Control" from 1934 - it's pretty trippy...

[Havoc]

Problem is how the internet works and the lack of education. We have come to a situation where if something is popular and easy then it is going up in the rankings until it is accepted as a truth. At the same time, the study of sources is not teached anymore. So when some "influencer" writes a nice story claiming Eastman invented the roll film, nobody is going to check sources like the archive of the patent office of the archive of the company. Maybe someone will react but that reaction will get drowned in the inane patter and that "influencer" has long gone telling other nice stories.

These days it takes lot of time to find something really interesting and underpinned on the net. Whatever you search for, you end up with a load of YT babble, some blogs, pinterest en reddit and if you are very lucky a Wikipedia entry containing nothing but links to dead references.

[neil poulsen]

William Mortensen was the Anti-Christ.

I forget where I read it, but it's my understanding that Ansel Adams was a Mortensen critic. And I can understand a bit why that might have been the case.

One of the important principles of consistently obtaining good black and white results, is to expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. It's based on how film behaves while being developed, that shadow areas on the negative (less dense areas) aren't affected nearly as much by changes in development time, as are highlights on the negative (areas of greater density). This principle is the basis of Ansel Adams Zone System.

I have several Mortensen books, and I couldn't believe it that he stated one should do the opposite, expose for the highlights and develop for the shadows. I had to read it a second time. This is profoundly wrong. Clearly, Mortensen didn't understand the fundamentals of how film behaves while being developed.

So, it's understandable why Mortenson might have drawn criticism from A. A.