If prints were made from slides in 1960, would the lab have done the following?

[oldkodachrome]

Thank you Torus34 and Dwig! (And thank you Dwig for answering my first post a couple of days ago.)

The plot thickens a little bit tonight, because my mother found a box with some color negatives of images that match the slides & the prints. But first...

My cardboard slide mounts are in excellent, like-new, mint condition. If they were baseball cards and if I were a collector of baseball cards (but I'm not), I would rate them as being in super-fine, pristine, C10 condition. The Kodak wording on my early slide mounts (1955-57) are printed in red ink with a red border on the emulsion side, (which I must say was a smart thing to do because the color red can serve as a reminder that you are looking at the emulsion side and the image in reverse). The other side only has "Made in U.S.A." and a little red number in the top corner BUT NO MONTH or DATE, just the little red number which was (as I have now been informed) printed by the processing lab. My early slides (again 1955-57) also do not have the date embossed into the cardboard. My slides from 1958 to around 1963 +/- are in plain white cardboard and have "Kodachrome Transparency" and "Processed by Kodak" in red ink on the emulsion side with the word Kodak printed on a yellow background in the bottom right corner. On the shiny side the month & date are embossed into the cardboard and the number & "Made in U.S.A." are in red ink. My slides from the mid-1960s are in plain white cardboard with "Color Transparency" & "This side toward screen" on the emulsion side and a number and month/date on the shiny side, both printed in red ink (and they are Kodachromes too).

My dating issues are only with the slides from 1955 and the first six months of 1956. And tonight the story thickens. So here's a little more background. In addition to my Kodachromes, I have about 15 Ektachrome slides from that time period. Those slides have "Ektachrome Transparency" printed in blue ink with a broken-slanted-line blue border on the emulsion side. On the shiny side there is just "Made in U.S.A." with no numbers or anything else. All of the Ektachrome images have turned red and have washed out the remaining colors. Some of the paper prints were from the Ektachrome slides, but most were from the Kodachromes. Even on the paper prints, you can tell which ones were Ektachromes, because the images are a little bit blurrier and the colors a little less saturated. On the back of the paper prints, there is printed in very light black ink "C 419" and absolutely nothing else. We have a receipt for half of the prints from a drugstore dated July 1961, but that drugstore did not do the processing ; it was done somewhere else. We don't have the receipt for the other half of the prints.

Tonight my mother found a box with the color negatives of all the paper prints, several dozen! There are 3 images on each strip of negative film. On several negatives, there is a Kodachrome image right next to an Ektachrome image. Then I found some with a photo taken in 1955 right next to one taken in March 1956 (a known date due to when my siblings were born and you can't change the date of birth!) followed by one taken in 1955 again. Another negative has 2 Kodachromes next to one Ektachrome and so on. Just to be extra super clear as to what I'm referring to: I have the slides, I'm scanning the slides, and the images in the slides are the exact images in the color paper prints and in the negatives, some of which came from Ektachrome slides and most of which came from Kodachrome slides.

I did a Google search and read part of some page that said to make prints from slides, you first made something called an inter-negative. Then from that inter-negative, you made your paper print. So I am now assuming that I have found the internegatives from which these paper prints were made, because what the heck else could they be since I have the original slide transparencies? These negatives look like they have turned a little red due to age when I compare them to some negatives I have of some color print film from the year 2008.

One other bit of forensic information AND THIS MAY BE KEY. One and just one Kodachrome slide was taken by a neighbor months before my father bought a camera and made the rest of the slides I am working with. That particular Kodachrome was put into a "Kodak Ready-Mount" cardboard slide mount. It was not put into the mount straight at all. It was so crooked the sprocket holes of the film were visible on the bottom left. So a week ago, I pried that mount apart and straightened out the film and re-glued the cardboard shut with Elmers glue. All is well now with that particular Kodachrome. BUT WAIT! When I found the paper print of that particular slide tonight, the printed image is also crooked and you can see the sprocket holes in the same bottom left corner. So at least for that one slide, I have proof that the paper print image was made from the slide without tearing it apart.

So all I can tell you folks now is that I have a bunch of color negatives of images that came from Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides from 1955 through 1957 and in 1961 some color negatives were made and some low-quality paper prints were made. My mother thinks (incorrectly I hope) that the slides were removed from their mounts to make the prints, yet I have one paper print & slide that says "NO WAY." I don't know for certain and that's the whole point of this Posting.

Based on what Dwig has said, along with what I just read tonight about internegatives, I would like to believe that these prints were made by making some internegatives and those internegatives were made without tearing apart the slide mounts. Then from those negatives, the paper prints were made.

Now is that how it was done in the late 1950's and early 60s?

Thank you for reading through this and helping me out.

Kind Regards again to all.
John

 

[KevinDks]

Interesting thread. There are a couple of Kodachrome dating guides that I use when slides I've bought at auction aren't date stamped. Not sure whether they will help you, but here are the URLs anyway:

KODACHROME SLIDE DATING GUIDE


http://trainutz.com/rcMOUNT.shtml

That first site also has a page which contains a very detailed guide to the edge markings on all Kodak films, which appears to allow you to pin down the precise year of manufacture, although I haven't tested it:

http://www.historicphotoarchive.com/f1/ekcode.html

You may also want to have a look on the APUG forum. There is a guy on there who worked for Kodak and who was involved in the production of Kodachrome, goes under the name 'Photo Engineer', plus lots of others who have worked with film for decades. Just a thought.

Kevin

 

[Buckster]

I'm gonna go with a bellows attachment with slide copier. I've got one sitting here right now for my old Nikon F that would have worked perfectly for this task.

It's a bellows on a rail system that attaches to the front of the Nikon F, and the lens goes on the front of the bellows. The slide holder is fixed to the far end of the rail system and the lens on the end of the bellows is then adjusted on the rail precisely to get focus on the slide that's in the slide holder, still in it's cardboard.

With Film loaded into the camera, any slide could be shot in any order on the roll of film, and then processed. So it would be easy to have a Kodachrome on the negative right next to a Ektachrome, and even from many years apart.

Here's some photos of the rig:

Your dad probably got his hands on one of these and did it himself. It's not Nikon exclusive either, Canon and other camera brands of the day had these rigs available.

 

[Dwig]

"Back in old'n times" Kodak had a Kodachrome print paper. This was a reversal paper for making prints from slides. It made good prints, at least from the early Kodachromes, but became commercially impractical. They later developed an Ektachrome print paper to replace it.

Reversal printing has its problems. These became worse as the films improved. The big issue was tonal range. Reversal papers can't handle the full tonal range of modern slides. Even in the late '50s and '60s this was true. Very often labs would make internegatives and use these to print Kodacolor prints.

Most of the time Kodak's labs printed reversal prints with standard 1/4" borders with the corners of the images slightly rounded, like the older slide mounts. When you see these rounded corners on a print you know the print was made directly from a slide. The papers were usually marked on the back either Kodachrome ('40s and early '50s) or Ektachrome. Prints from internegatives would have square corners and would likely be marked Kodacolor.

While I've shot Kodachrome and Ektachrome since the late '50s, my dad handled all the chores of getting the film processed until I was in Junior High in the early '60s. I rarely printed slides when I took over the "lab work" as most of my shooting had shifted to B&W, relegating color slides to family snapshots.

It wasn't until I started working in camera stores in the early '70s that I learned most of the detail about how large labs, particularily Kodak's, operated. By that time, all of Kodak's own internegatives were done on long roll film stock the same width and thickness as 120 film (it wasn't technically 120 because it wasn't on a 120 spool and lacked paper backing) with images in the conventional 6x9 format. In the decades that I worked behind the counter I never say internegs returned from Kodak in any form other than single negs. They were never in strips.

Some hobbyists would make their own internegs. This rarely worked overly well unless they either used the special internegative films (long rolls they would have to cut and spool into cassettes) or used elaborate pre-flashing exposure techniques combined with modified processing. Some smaller labs and custom labs would make internegatives using various techniques. By the time I got into the camera business, custom labs were using 4x5 for internegs almost exclusively.

The mis-mounted slide could have come into existance a number of ways; the matching tilted print is obviously one made from the mounted slide. Kodak's, and almost all other lab's, mounting equipment was rather automated. It did require an operator, but it metered the film through the cutter on its own. The operator had a "reject button" (button, lever, ??) to reject sections of film that were not properly spaced (overlapping, not full length). Kodak always returned the rejected film strip. If there were images on the rejected portion of the roll Kodak would also return blank mounts for each image. These mounts would be their regular retail "Ready-Mounts" that could be sealed with a household iron. The user would be left with the mounting chore if they felt the image was worth the effort. This is very likely the story behind the mis-mounted slide. In my day, the normal lab mounts were white with either red Kodachrome, blue Ektachrome, or black Kodacolor branding while the Ready-Mounts were grey. In the '50s, the lab mounts were generally grey.

 

[oldkodachrome]

Wow! Great information from those in the know!

Thanks KevinDks for that Kodak Slide Dating URL and the others. I'll take a look at that slide dating page. It could provide me with some interesting background info. But today on account of the terrific postings by Buckster and Dwig, I'm happy to report I now know the month, day, and year 12+ slides were made, because their slide mounts were not torn apart to make the paper prints. So a big thanks goes to Buckster and another big thanks to Dwig for their help.

Thank you Buckster for the photos of the slide copier!! It's now perfectly clear that the use of such a device was in fact how the paper prints were made. It explains everything! The negatives I have are nothing more than run-of-the-mill color print negatives, made using a camera set up in a device shown in Buckster's photos. They are not internegatives (from the information provided by Dwig) since there are 3 images in each flat strip of film. But my Dad didn't do them, because he never had such equipment; he just dropped off the slides to the drugstore which then farmed it out to a local photo lab or Joe the photographer.

Thanks once again Dwig, you are a true treasure trove of valuable information! My paper prints have square images and square white borders, but the white borders vary in width on each print from 1/8-inch to 1/4-inch. The images are not centered on the paper on any of them, they're all just randomly spaced with an acceptable appearance, but not perfect on all sides. Some have a 1/4-inch border on the left & top and a 1/8-inch border on the right & bottom; others have a 1/4-inch border on the bottom & right and 1/8 on the top & left -- just random. On the back, the paper is free of any manufacturer's markings. That drugstore dropped off this printing job to some lab or independent photographer who used something like Buckster's apparatus, some color print film, and some cheap paper, nothing more, nothing less. These paper prints were not done using Kodak methods; I'm convinced of that based on what you folks have posted.

So my question has been answered. Hooray!! My family's old Kodachrome slides were not torn open to make the paper prints. These low-quality prints were made using a slide copier like that shown by Buckster. So now we all know.

I'm done with this thread. Thanks everybody for your help.

Warm Regards,
John