Mouthwatering Kodachrome – B25, DB7, A36?

T-34 not!

Not that it really matters but : The turret looks more like that from a Russian KV-1, possibly Model 1941.
I suppose for the photographer and or the person labeling the photo that all Russian tanks were T-34’s. Just like all enemy planes were Messerschmidt’s or Zero’s for many people at the time.

Early Kodachrome

Reading the history of Kodachrome online, it seems the 5×4 sheet film version was only ASA 8 or 10 which I think equates to about 1/60 or 1/125 at f/5.6 in sunshine…. at least the aircraft props would look nice and blurred :)….as well as camera shake problems , depth of field would have been tricky with 5×4 cameras (as exemplified in Charles E Browns R.N. Avenger pic I think)

Martti, I think you are right that these are hand-tinted. I must admit that I accepted them as colour photos when I first saw them. As you say, that T-34 shot is probably German as it has that blue cast similar to others taken at that time.

As for colour film, the last ten minutes of Eisenstein’s epic film, Ivan the Terrible Part 2, is shot on captured stocks of Agfa specially allotted to him in 1945. There is also colour footage of the victory parade in Moscow viewable on YouTube. Presumably still camera film was similarly acquired?

If so they are very well done. I could believe the Yaks flying shot was but the soldiers in uniforms I not so sure.

You can see it from the faces, they are too saturated and “flat” as are the colors in all the other photos. Compare them to the T-34 shot which seems to be a genuine German color photo.

Martti

You’re almost certainly right, I didn’t give that much thought! Mutiple hits so presumably some sort of automatic weapon. Rather too many for that inadequate anti-tank gun that the Germans called the ‘Wehrmacht’s door-knocker’ because the shells tended to bounce off Soviet armour.

Atcham, Martti thinks your Russian pics are ‘colored black and white photos’.
If so they are very well done. I could believe the Yaks flying shot was but the soldiers in uniforms I not so sure.
You’d need a large format neg to be working on to touch up b-and-w to a high standard I guess. I’ve tried it in Photoshop and even that is very hard work.
Do we know if the Russians had colour film in WW2?

Dave T

It would be one hell of a Stuka pilot, who could hit a T-34 from that angle……looks like they hit straight from the side.

A few more Russian colour photos. I wonder if the T-34 was a victim of Stuka attack?

pagen01, Google English Russia for an amazing site. Warning: you will get side-tracked with all sorts of fascinating stuff! There is a lot of aviation and WW2 material in there but you have to search around.

Fantastic images. Thanks for posting the link 🙂

A few colour shots of Russian wartime aviation turned up recently.

Those are colored black and white photos. For the Library of Congress photos, see the link.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html

Assembling B-25 bombers at North American Aviation, Kansas City, Kan[sas]

They are certainly the best Russian pictures I have seen, have they lain hidden until now?

A few colour shots of Russian wartime aviation turned up recently. Not brilliant but take a look at the new and highly recommended books on Soviet Airpower and US Aircraft in Russian/Soviet Service from Midland Publishing. Most of the b&w photos are of very high standard.

Conversely the Allies shot their early stuff in black & white, especially when they were on the back foot, but as they started getting on top we stated using colour film, partly for supply and partly for positivity reasons.

The US Navy always used color motion picture film from the earliest days of the war (See the film Midway…it used a lot of wartime Navy shots) and even the famous shot of the USS Arizona blowing up at Pearl Harbour was originally on color stock (which was later lost or at least misplaced for many years while B&W dubs were used a great deal).

The USAAF largely used B&W for stills. Many of the great color shots…like the ones shown in the link…were often taken by aircraft manufacturers.

For many hobbyist it was also a matter of developing and printing your own pictures. This was/is more expensive and complicated than B&W.

Even in the 80’s most books on hobby photography only covered B&W developing and printing.

I was just about to say much the same – I don’t have any figures to hand, but I do know that the first couple of rolls of baby photos of me (born 1971) were taken on black-and-white film, so colour (127!) wasn’t all that cheap even by then.

Those of us who weren’t there obviously don’t remember how expensive almost everything was in the days of purchase tax and post-war rebuilding.

Adrian

It’s strange now to think on how slow many photographers were in moving to colour…and I mean long after the war when it was readily available.

I know two productive aviaiton photographers (one prolific), both say that colour was prohibitively expensive until the early ’60s

It’s strange now to think on how slow many photographers were in moving to colour…and I mean long after the war when it was readily available.
There was a continuing acceptance I think that black and white was still the normal way that we viewed illustrations of all sorts. Even as late as the early 60’s when I first got interested in photography, newspapers and TV were still in black and white, although of course movies were all colour.
It was not seen as strange to shoot say your family snaps still in b-and-w. Colour was usually only Kodachrome or Agfa, both transparencies only and pretty slow. I remember in the late 60’s that Kodachrome had become available in ASA25 and ASA64 versions, but the later was noticeably grainy.
Transparency stock is infact capable of a wider ‘dynamic range’ than negative material and transparencies were required for ‘commercial printing’ anyway, so it continued for most professional work.
Even in the late 60’s however many of us were still biased away from using colour because of the cost and the difficulty that transparencies faded easily and needed a projector to display. Eventually Ektachrome and other neg films from other manufacturers changed our perception and finally automated processing moved into the high street.
DT

Early Kodachrome….History’s tricky stuff

In the preface to ‘The Royal Air Force of World War Two’ by Roger Freeman 1993 it says that Bill Ziff of Flying magazine sent over 100 sheets of 5×4 Kodachrome in Nov 1941 for the magazines RAF issue(out Sep 1942), one exposed set of 31 shots being sent to Flying in May 1942 along with another 31 to the British Information Service in Washington….mostly by Charles E Brown.The preface also says that Brown had been using 35mm Kodachrome in his Zeiss Contax on RAF fields sparingly since early 1941 although he shot a whole role on Stirlings at Waterbeach in 1942…. I think he would have taken both cameras on such important official assignments….Mick (Worth noting those Walrus/Pisa pics come up large if you open them into a new window)

Russians, Japanese etc, we didn’t touch on, a big generally here though, it always looks awful quality, or is that because of what was released to rthe west post-war and not a good chance of archiving?

Good question. In the case of Russian material, there were some very different cultural norms – a strong graphic design culture, plus heavy use of retouching in photos (not just to remove ex- party members) caused a drive to very different standards in the b&w photography. Aircraft were often very well incorporated into propaganda posters, but most shots available at the time were pretty ropey, I think. There’s a lot more to be said there too…