Disturbing the tranquility

The cows tolerate the old RS-1 as it trundles past Merrill Farm once a week and a few times a day on the weekends. What should happen to be in tow today? A Sceniced and Undecided boxcar! This image pre-dates the Mail Pouch paint job on the barn. Note that the windmill not only spun, but swung side-to-side as the direction of the N scale wind changed; I'm planning a newer version that would also randomly change speed.

Image specs: This is a 35mm Ektachrome 200 slide taken with a Canon TL and a 50mm lens modified with a 300 micron pinhole. Illumination consisted of three 500-watt daylight tungsten photofloods. Exposure was in the range of 30 seconds to a minute. The slide was digitized with a Konica/Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV. Brightness, contrast, gamma, hue and saturation were adjusted for best appearance on the internet; aside from this, the only digital manipulation performed was the removal of dust specks.

Just for fun: During a recent forum discussion on model photography (specifically, digital manipulation), the notion of converting steam-era images to black and white came up, and I was inspired to take it a little further and explore methods of making images appear to have been taken in the earliest days of color film as well. To illustrate my ideas, I produced these special-effects versions of the original image above.

Here's a grainy, faded old color slide. To produce this effect, I added noise to simulate film grain, lowered the contrast slightly, reduced the color saturation significantly, then cranked up the yellow and red shades.

Creating the black and white image that follows was not just a straightforward convert-to-grayscale step. The problem with this trick is that it doesn't simulate the way real black and white film responds to different colors. Making matters more complicated, there were many different types of film in use back in the day, and each exhibited different color response (going so far as to simulate a specific film type would be a lengthy exercise that might be appreciated by, perhaps, about three people). Still, the grayscale trick produces results that look just slightly "off" to anyone who has used black and white film.

As a quick-and-dirty way of simulating the chromatic response of "generic" black and white film, I just split the image into the RGB color channels and selected the green channel. You can see the subtle effect this produced by looking at the the farm tractor under the windmill: applying a simple grayscale, it would have been about the same shade of gray as the surrounding vegetation (as seen at right); however, in the green channel, it's darker than the surroundings, which is more in keeping with the expected behavior of typical black and white film. I also sharpened the image to give it the crispness one often sees in good black and white prints.

By the way, I'd already experimented with sepia tone images.

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