100 years Null-Serie

[beoon]

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17 hours ago, beoon said:

Bill, Oscar & William,

I can now confirm the two "brothers Schmidt" with Conrad and Hannah in the 1914 photo by Oskar Barnack are the children of a Leitz workshop foreman called Herr Schmidt.

The brothers names are Wilhelm and Fritz Schmidt.

It took a bit of digging today into Leitz history, but I got there in the end, so mystery solved.

Alan

I have searched for an employee named Schmidt at Leitz prior to circa 1900 without success.

A Leitz works employee group photograph of 1895 did not list anyone named Schmidt

I could only find references to two Leitz employees named Schmidt on the Leitz war memorial for 1914-1918

Friedrich Schmidt 18.9.91 - 16.11.1917

Fritz Schmidt 18.5.93 - 31.7.1917

Alan

 

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[derleicaman]

Alan, you have been doing excellent detective work here. Maybe you should put an article together for Viewfinder on these images from the Ur and the story of the people in the pictures!

[derleicaman]

12 hours ago, beoon said:

I have searched for an employee named Schmidt at Leitz prior to circa 1900 without success.

A Leitz works employee group photograph of 1895 did not list anyone named Schmidt

I could only find references to two Leitz employees named Schmidt on the Leitz war memorial for 1914-1918

Friedrich Schmidt 18.9.91 - 16.11.1917

Fritz Schmidt 18.5.93 - 31.7.1917

Alan

 

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This memorial is in the same Friedhof that the Leitz family and Barnack is buried in. Would you like to visit it when we are there?

[beoon]

4 hours ago, derleicaman said:

This memorial is in the same Friedhof that the Leitz family and Barnack is buried in. Would you like to visit it when we are there?

Hi Bill, Yes, that would be of great interest to visit that location.

Alan

[willeica]

1 hour ago, beoon said:

Hi Bill, Yes, that would be of great interest to visit that location.

Alan

Alan, I'm planing to go with David Knoble and others, possibly on the 25th of June. The graveyard is beside the hotel where we and Bill's group will be staying. We visited there in 2018. The Leitz family grave was easy to find, but we eventually found the graves of Barnack and Berek. In the case of the former you will find that he is called 'Oscar' on his headstone, possibly Conrad's doing.

William 

[sandro]

And don't forget to look at Max Berek's grave when you will be there. I found it again rather easily last time I was in Wetzlar, Barnack's grave took me some more time but I found it again as well. The Leitz family grave is soon on the left upon entering the graveyard.

Lex

[willeica]

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2 hours ago, sandro said:

And don't forget to look at Max Berek's grave when you will be there. I found it again rather easily last time I was in Wetzlar, Barnack's grave took me some more time but I found it again as well. The Leitz family grave is soon on the left upon entering the graveyard.

Lex

Yes, we saw Berek's grave which is over towards Barnack's grave. You can see the Barnack, Berek and Leitz graves here plus copies of the UR-Leica and M875 about 2/3rds of the way through.

https://www.macfilos.com/2018/10/19/2018-10-18-lhsa-meeting-in-wetzlar-cruising-down-the-rhine-and-losing-my-heart-in-heidelberg/

William 

 

Edited June 1 by willeica

[Roland Zwiers]

Alan,

Unfortunately I can not join the celebrations in Wetzlar.
I have family staying with us in this period.
This also means that I am extremely busy tidying up the house 🙂

Your note is fascinating and requires further research!
There are several clues as to the date.
This also depends on the exact translation of the handwritten text.
In general the translation looks allright, with possibly one or two exceptions.
I will come back to this later.

The note looks like a sepatate note on a separate sheet of paper.
Ulf Richter (2009) shows several such handwritten notes, but not this one.

This discussion on early Barnack/ Dumur/ Ernst Leitz II pictures is extremely relevant for understanding the early technological bottlenecks for Leica photography.
As to dating the early negatives, two clues are helpful:

• The age of Oskar Barnack's children
  (so as to distinguish pictures in the period 1914-1917)
   
• The quality of the negatives in terms of grain and orthochomatism
  (So as to distinguish regular colourblind cine negative film from orthochromatic film).
  And to make a further distiction between two orthochromatic techniques, A and B.
  Orthochromatic A starts with a colourblind film that is sensitised to colour in a water bath by Oskar Barnack himself.
  Orthochromatic B relates to a (Flieger)film that was already colour-sensitised by the manufacturer;
  1915-1918 in case of Agfa Fliegerfilm 
  1924 = Toxo cine negative film 
  1925 = Perutz Grünsiegelfilm
  1927 = Perutz Fliegerfilm.

I will continue these subjects on the next pages.

 

 

 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

The age of Oskar Barnack's children

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[Roland Zwiers]

In the previous post I included the wellknown market square (1914?) picture with a second picture of the same scene.
I assume that Conrad Barnack is on the foreground, looking at his father.
I also assume that Oskar Barnack didn't realise that Conrad was in the picture!

Now even though we can only see the head of Conrad, one can still infer that he is a very young child.
Also note that Conrad has very short hair.

[Roland Zwiers]

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[Roland Zwiers]

This group picture may have been taken in 1914 as well.
Note that Conrad has very short hair.

[Roland Zwiers]

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[Roland Zwiers]

Another picture that may date from 1914.
Compared with the previous picture Conrad's and Hanna's hair is somewhat longer.
So I infer that this picture is taken one or two months later in 1914.
 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

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[Roland Zwiers]

In the previous posting I included a negative that I obtained via Ulf Richter.
One can see Conrad Barnack with very short hair again, but he looks older than on the eallier pictures.
So what year would this be?
1915, 1916, 1917?

From the ruler we can infer a negative of 37mm long.
One has to consider, however, the possibility that this is not the original negative!
When I visited the Leitz archive in 2023 I got the impression that several negatives had been copied on safety film at a later stage.
In copying the dimensions of the original negative may have changed slightly.

In Oskar Barnack's work notes one can find several references to copying devices.
In cinematography copying was done so as to project the film on to the silver screen.
For this one used an exceptionally fine-grained cine positive film.

Another reason for copying was to safe the negative on a stable film base.
The original film base was based on nitro-cellulose, which was highly perishable and even inflameable.
After all, nitro-cellulose is closely related to gun cotton!

So one research area is to find out how many original (nitro-cellulose) Oskar Barnack negatives have survived after all these years.
And what remaining negatives have been rescued by copying them on safety film at a later date.
 

 

 

 

 

[Roland Zwiers]

The second clue as to early negatives has to do with grain and orthochomatism

This is a big subject and I cannot possible finish this in one hour or so.
One can see that Ernst Leitz II used a colour blind cine negative film during his June 1914 visit to the USA.
One advantage of colour blind film was that it had very good keeping properties.
This was relevant for a long trip abroad.
Oskar Barnack may well have cut the films to size in Germany.

Note the light stains on the waterfall picture.
I assume that this was caused by internal reflections in the Summar lens.
This lens had six separate lens elements separated by air.
This construction was prone to flare, especially in the absence of a sunshade.

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[Roland Zwiers]

Several early Oskar Barnack pictures show that he experimented with colour sensitive film, that is film that was also sensitive to the colours yellow and green.
In the pictures of 1914-1915 he had no choice but to colour-sensitize the colour-blind film himself.
The procedure was to use a water bath with a chemical dye like Eosin.
Leitz was familiar with this procedure for micro-photography.

The text below is from 1911 (Amateur Photographer Magazine)

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[Roland Zwiers]

From 1915 onwards, Agfa produced colour sensitive cine negative film for a new generation of German aerial reconnaissance cameras.
The designer of these cameras (Oskar Messter) used film strips that stood a a right angle to the direction of flight.
A picture is better than a 1000 words.
As one can see his first experiment was made on 26 May 1915.

Now one must realise that the general adjective in the German language relating to aerial reconnaissance photography was 'Flieger' ('pilot' in english).
So the aerial reconnaissance photo camera was called Fliegerkamera.
This camera usually used dry plates= Fliegerplatte. 

It was Oskar Messter's invention to use film material instead of dry plates.
So the film inside his Fliegerkamera was called Fliegerfilm.

During 1915-1918 this Fliegerfilm was produced by Agfa in Wolfen.
Originally Oskar Messter used unperforated cine negative (35mm) film in lengths of 60-120 meter.
Later Fliegerkameras used films of 6cm wide.

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[Roland Zwiers]

What does this mean for Oskar Barnack's experiments with colour-sensitive black-and-white film?

One can infer that from 1915 onwards he may have had access to the Fliegerfilm as produced by Agfa in Wolfen.
Typically, this Fliegerfilm (like the Fliegerplatte) would have been orthochomatic as this was important for aerial reconnaissance work.
The example picture, an orthochromatic dry plate (Fliegerplatte) is of British origin.
With a colour-blind plate the yellow fields would have become much darker.
This would have been a handicap for strategic analysis.

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