I had a nice phone call with Peter, and he advised me that Smith college is where Quesnell’s secret mark stuff is archived at. I browsed over there, and there is news!!
They do not have the negatives of the photos which Dourvas took and Quesnell paid for. That’s because there never were any negatives!!! *chuckle*
Instead, smith college has the original *slides*. Which is even better. In 1983 the highest possible quality photo you could take with a 35 mm camera was slides. Recall (uh, those of you who are old enough to remember such ancient tech) slides are meant to be blown waaaay up and projected on a big screen. So the film has to have a very small grain, or the pictures would look very grainy at such magnification.
In addition, slides are taken in positive color, not negatives. This is great when you are viewing projected slides—the slide itself was what was exposed by the camera, there are no intermediate steps between you and the image taken.
However, in order to get a *printed picture* from a slide, you first have to, as it were, take a picture of the slide on regular film, to get a negative, and then use that negative to print the photos from.
I.E. there is an extra step, which was done using an analog (therefore prone to noise) process, so photos printed from slides are notoriously lower quality than the slides they came from.
Smith college actually has pdf’s of scans taken straight from the slides ( see https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositor ... iners/1630) but, being PDF’s they probably are not the best images obtainable.
But at any rate, we are finally in the position to determine whether my hypothesis that there exists very high quality versions of these photos is true or not. At the very least, if you plopped those slides into a vintage Kodak carousel slide projector, you could see an image of them which is far better than any printed image ever took of them.
They do not have the negatives of the photos which Dourvas took and Quesnell paid for. That’s because there never were any negatives!!! *chuckle*
Instead, smith college has the original *slides*. Which is even better. In 1983 the highest possible quality photo you could take with a 35 mm camera was slides. Recall (uh, those of you who are old enough to remember such ancient tech) slides are meant to be blown waaaay up and projected on a big screen. So the film has to have a very small grain, or the pictures would look very grainy at such magnification.
In addition, slides are taken in positive color, not negatives. This is great when you are viewing projected slides—the slide itself was what was exposed by the camera, there are no intermediate steps between you and the image taken.
However, in order to get a *printed picture* from a slide, you first have to, as it were, take a picture of the slide on regular film, to get a negative, and then use that negative to print the photos from.
I.E. there is an extra step, which was done using an analog (therefore prone to noise) process, so photos printed from slides are notoriously lower quality than the slides they came from.
Smith college actually has pdf’s of scans taken straight from the slides ( see https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositor ... iners/1630) but, being PDF’s they probably are not the best images obtainable.
But at any rate, we are finally in the position to determine whether my hypothesis that there exists very high quality versions of these photos is true or not. At the very least, if you plopped those slides into a vintage Kodak carousel slide projector, you could see an image of them which is far better than any printed image ever took of them.
Statistics: Posted by RandyHelzerman — Mon May 20, 2024 3:47 pm