WW1 Pilot's images newly developed

[Phoenix1969]

Pilot's war images developed 100 years on - BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37261175)

For interest. Wish I was near to Leyland!

[PAXboy]

Wonderful. I do hope that PPRuNers will be able to name all the aircraft shown, since the BBC omitted this information.

[Stanwell]

.
I don't think there'd be any prizes on offer for naming those two distinctive types.
Excellent pics, BTW.

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[The late XV105]

Truly fabulous. Thanks for sharing the link. The stunning results are testimony to Mr. Lewis' skill.

I am certain though that the excitement (and anxiety) I used to feel when developing my own photos back in the day was nothing to what was experienced here!

[PAXboy]

I didn't offer a prize and, to me, they are not distinctive because only one of them is vaguely familiar and the other I have not seen before.

[Stanwell]

Oh, OK.
Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2c and Farman Shorthorn. :ok:


p.s. Sorry, PAXboy, I wasn't trying to be smart there.
Thinking about it, there are two other aircraft that do bear a passing resemblance to those - the RAF R.E.8 and the Vickers Gunbus.
.

[PAXboy]

Thanks Stanwell. :ok:

Very interesting. I can only name about four aircraft from that era by sight.

[ian16th]

The pictures are going on display at this small museum in Lancashire.
Exhibitions and Activities - South Ribble Museum (http://south-ribble.co.uk/srmuseum/pages/activities/activities.htm)

It would be very nice, for those of us in foreign parts, if they were available on the Internet.

Maybe they have commercial value and will be published in a book.

[PAXboy]

Hopefully, someone like the RAF will sponsor for the images to visit Hendon and their other venues and that could get the ball rolling. If the small museum has them as a gift, they can rent the exhibition out and swell their own coffers.

[FlightlessParrot]

It's the old wet-chemistry pedant in me speaking, but I think what the BBC meant was that the photographs were printed for the first time. It's aeronautically irrelevant, but it would be a bfd if negatives were successfully developed after a century.

Kids these days, probably never even taken a roll into a 1-hour d&p joint, no respect, even taken away the 3.5mm stereo socket, life comes with no magenta line, ....

[PAXboy]

Agrred Flightlessparrot. They would not know what type of emulsion they were or what 'speed' it was. You would have to start by cutting off small samples to test process and then lose images. It's entirely possible that they were printed but the negatives had become separated from the. I do hope that they have scanned them at very high resolution, in case anything happens to the negatives.

[FlightlessParrot]

Paxboy, if they're smart they've scanned the negs and done the printing with an inkjet. It is much easier to control the tonal range, adjust highlights and shadows, and indeed spot out dust marks, in digital than playing around with tufts of cotton wool on the end of bits of wire.

[Chris Scott]

FlightlessParrot is right: according to the Curator of the South Ribble Museum, the original film was developed (i.e., into negatives) in 1917/18. The writer of the BBC piece seems to have been unfamiliar with the processing terminology for photographic film...

What excellent images!

[Wander00]

Why should a BBC reporter be any more knowledgeable about the technicalities of photography than anything else on which he/she might report. Their level of ignorance on even "general knowledge" areas is astounding

[Haraka]

Wander00 . Was it not Mark Twain who said something along the lines that ;

"Those who do not read newspapers are uninformed: those who do , misinformed." ?

[Wander00]

H. A cracking quotation which I will remember to slip into conversations, especially with a couple of Daily Mail readers of mu acquaintance

[David Rayment]

'Landing strips were usually rough fields, the aircraft were string-bound wooden struts and canvas, and crashes were very frequent'

Hmm - I always thought that canvas was for tents and that doped Irish Linen was used as the covering. Why do we never see reference to high tensile flying wires etc. It always seems to be 'string'. When you see a wreck of an early a/c think 'energy absorbing structure. When you see pictures of the wrecks of modern aircraft why do the captions never (rarely?) mention flimsy structure. Am I suffering from Meldruitis here?