Re: Restoration of the tri-color camera. An update.

----- Original Message -----
From: <Argon3@aol.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 8:56 AM
Subject: Re: Restoration of the tri-color camera. An update.

> Congrats on the ebay win...the cost of restoring the
> original looked like a
> real obstacle (not insurmountable but damn inconvenient)
> but this seems to help
> you along.
>
> I've been watching this thread with interest...I saw an
> article in one of the
> OLD issues of American Photographer (before it became a
> girlie magazine) that
> described the process and it has always seemed
> fascinating. I've always
> been tempted to do some speration type original negs with
> what I believe is
> called the Harris Shutter technique but there never seems
> to be enough time.
> Getting back to that old article, it looked like the
> three-color was a standard
> method of producing color magazine cover shots back in
> "the day"...I think the
> subject being photographed in the illustrations
> accompanying the article was
> Tex Ritter or Hopalong Cassidy or some other movie cowboy
> of similar vintage.
> If I can find the article, I'll try to find a way to pass
> it along.
>
> best and good luck
>
> argon
>
   I think the magazine you refer to was _American
Photography_. This was a high quality magazine published in
Boston. Eventually it became a combination of several
earlier magazines. I have a small collection of them. It was
the bastion of "pictorialism" and had many articles on
alternative processes. About 1940 it merged with a large
format magazine published by McGraw-Hill aimed at commercial
photographers and adopted the larger format. It continued to
be published into the early fifties but died then. The
1930's period magazines are quite intresting both for the
technical articles and the pictorialist viewpoint they
espouse.
   One shot cameras were used for color advertising and
magazine illustration for perhaps 20 years. They were
finally killed off by Kodachrome and later by Ektachrome.
Especially the latter which could be developed by the
photographer. Usually, the color separation negatives were
printed by the three color carbro process and that
photographed to make the color printing plates. Kodachrome
transparencies could be photographed directly by the process
camera resulting in sharper images and better color.
Nonetheless the control offered by the camera and printing
method kept it in use long after Kodachrome made its
appearance in sheet film sizes. Dye transfer printing was
also used for the color seps but that did not become
available in a reliable form until the mid or late 1940's.
   Labs who made color carbro usually did nothing else. It
was evidently a difficult process to control.

---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@ix.netcom.com