Another snippet of my 15 minutes....

[Mick_VT]

Yours truly got his face in the newspaper today http://www.vnews.com/Civil-War-Reenacto ... es-4788549 (I'm in the last picture)

[Wackyshack]

That is fantastic!!! You must have had a great time with all those goodies on the shelf!

I am glad you shared this I was not aware of this event... awesome idea.

[Vala]

Wow that's pretty cool!!

[Gothichome]

Mick, I wasn't aware you volunteer at a heritage museum. Good on you.

[Corsetière]

Nice! Well done!

[Mick_VT]

Mick, I wasn't aware you volunteer at a heritage museum. Good on you.

Being doing it ten years now, luckily for me the museum is only open for 4 days per year

[phil]

How neat ! the pictures look so authentic. what a dignified looking gentleman
thanks for sharing a glimpse into the Museum.
Phil

[Mick_VT]

How neat ! the pictures look so authentic. what a dignified looking gentleman
thanks for sharing a glimpse into the Museum.
Phil

The photographer used a medium format film camera with a half second exposure utilizing available light, to get a period ethereal feel. We had to close our eyes then open them just before he released the shutter so that we would not blink mid-shot.

A neat fact he shared was that the newspaper still has a complete and functional darkroom, though it is seldom ever used these days.

[phil]

in a previous life I was a darkroom technician so I know how to use a process camera, do color separations the old way with color filters and film. Im a qualified stripper , that is someone who assembles the film I was a pressman by trade , then a field technician then I did remote support on all the modern complex machines.

these darkroom skills and training are pretty well useless today now we have gone digital. We used to use potassium ferricyanide for dot etching poisonous stuff. I even remember buying the plates with just metal - no coating and we'd apply the light sensitive coating with a sponge. I think that stuff was pretty poisonous too.

I actually bought an enlarger and darkroom stuff in grade 7 and got into processing my own camera film and prints. it was fun and creative and what better plan could a guy have to get the girls alone in the dark

I still have an old chandler and price platten press here's some photos of it.
it sits in my back yard covered. it's too big to get in the house, too pretty to scrap. this machine can still be used for printing on odd surfaces like a napkin or a book of matches. It can be used for foil printing and die cutting and embossing so it's possible to make special dies to do things that modern machines still can't easily do. Ive spent lots of time treadling them and saw a couple of guys crush their fingers. these machines were responsible for the loss of many fingers. One company I worked for used them to print on the covers of already finished magazines.

http://www.members.shaw.ca/volvo/html/chand.htm

the company I worked for for 9 years doing remote tech support revolutionized the industry. They were actually using lasers to try to design and build a two terabyte hard drive. that was an unimaginable amount then. it would be used by banks and such to back up info. not for home use. now you can get one for a couple hundred bucks. they used lasers and had lots of engineers working on how to control them , that's a lot of what I did , ran scripts and tests to adjust the swath and a myriid of fine adjustments to the optics of lasers. they'd have hundreds of pixels crammed into a strip about 1/8th inch. the light sensitive plates are spun on a drum and the data is spooled to the laser array and that's how printing is done today. The plates are then mounted on the press and one color is run on each unit or section of the printing press. This invention revolutionized printing. It stopped the entire printing industry throughout the world from needing to use film. previous to that film was needed for everything printed and for each color. Kodak was a major supplier and they eventually bought the company I worked for. Kodak is bankrupt now, they took the kodachrome away but the enterprise I worked for still exists under the kodak name they still build machines although mostly overseas.

I was trained on film assembly in the old days we'd have to piece together sections of film. anything printed was put in the camera. anywhere there was a photo they would put in a red rubylith square and that made a clear window in the film. photographs needed to be screened so we'd photograph the photos and process those differently. We put a special screen in the camera back called a magenta contact screen to break the continuous tone photo into a dot pattern, the film with photos and film with various colors of type were assembled into flats of film that would be positioned to fit very precisely. registration needs to be very accurate. printing plates were made by exposing the metal printing plates in a contact frame with an arc lamp. and were used to make all the plates for a print run. I even learned ot scribe film. we'd take blank film and using a scribe we'd actually scratch lines on the film , like if you wanted some lined paper in one section, yup we'd scribe the film

I remember one of the printshops had a line ruling machine. it was a big wooden machine with a row of quills, the paper would spool from one end of the machine under the quils and be rewound. the operator would pay special attention to how wide and how dark each line was and they would have to adjust them and refill the ink. I remember as a kid we used to see ruled lines usually light blue ink. I remember some of the lines were darker and some were lighter and I guess that's why.

lots of print-shops had old platten presses like the one in my photos in their entrance on display. they are very good examples of how industrial design and beauty can come together. the old platten presses dont' use printing plates in the form of a sheet. the images were all made on lead type, even photos were mounted on wood blocks and assembled in the chase with the lead type.

all that film contained silver. the chemicals used to develop it and the silver it contained were usually dumped down the drain , the printing industry was quite nasty environmentally. Nowadays they have a bit better chemicals and we use less paper. back in the day any business needed a printer just to do all his stationary and this was replaced in part by computers. My recycle bin still gets full which proves the industry is still not dead.

[Nicholas]

That is cool, and as someone who hated history and now studies it, I would love to be a part of a re enactment.