This is another in my occasional series which looks at a vintage film emulsion and tries to show what it would look like if the film were still available today. In this post, I'm looking at Anscochrome film.
TV Advert
I have to admit, I'd never heard of Anscochrome film when I used to regularly take slide pictures in the 1960 and 70s, but in a similar way to the Perutz film I featured a couple of weeks ago, I found this TV advert (in black & white!) which was produced at the time the film was available.
Anscochrome is a film which is not often found in the UK although I do have a few in my collection. A few weeks ago however, I found a whole set of 15 Anscochrome film slides taken by the same photographer in a collection I bought. They all seem to be taken in the same rocky, mountainous desert which could very well be in the USA, so I suspect the photographer, who seemed to be from England if the other slides he took were anything to go by, probably bought the film whilst on holiday in the States.
The slides are all cardboard mounted, and have a processing date stamped on the back of the slide which is August 1961 so I would assume that all the picture shown below were taken in the summer of 1961.
The Anscochrome film pictures
The pictures I have on Anscochrome film are shown in the gallery below. As with other images in the 'Look of' series, they have all been scanned on an Epson V550 Photo printer, with no post processing to the images other than setting the exposure, in an attempt to show the image without any additions or amendments.
The aim of the 'look of' series is to try to show what a film emulsion would look like when the photographer received it back from the processors, but although the images below have had no changes in post processing, they are now 57 years old and I suspect that the emulsion has changed quite a lot in that time.
All the images have a very blue tint to them, and I am pretty sure that is not the way they looked when first processed. In that sense the 'Look Of' series will always be a failure because the ravages of time will affect different emulsions in different ways; in the case of Anscochrome that seems to have been to introduce a severe blue cast to the pictures. I suppose that could be useful to identify an emulsion which has a blue tint but isn't in an Anscochrome slide mount, although the other Anscochrome pictures in my collection suggest this isn't always the case.
I am actually in the middle of scanning some Anscochrome slides on my own Epson Perfection V550 scanner, and they come from 1971 and are still in good condition apart from some growths on some of them. The colours are a bit washed out, or maybe it is the contrast, because the scans just need a bit of contrast enhancement to look acceptable. Not the sharpest of film stock, though.