I’ve been enjoying the thread and appreciate the brain power put to work to flesh out all the interesting possibilities that may have caused the photo to look the way it does. I’d like to add another (collective groan).
Filters. Since the beginnings of black and white photography applying one or more filters of a certain color limits or enhances the transmission of light onto film stock. Example: A red filter over the lens taking a picture of a landscape with a big blue sky and puffy white clouds will render the sky as almost black and will allow lots of detail (sometimes unseen by the naked eye) to pop out of the clouds. A popular tool used by landscape photographers and a technique that dates to long before the US Civil War.
You can use all sorts of different colors to establish a certain contrast between different colors, red, yellow, green, and orange seem to be popular among rail shooters depending on the paint scheme of the equipment. Many a rail photographer has used a filter for emphasis to highlight the nose wings on a SP or L&N locomotive against the gray backgrounds, or for evil to turn the yellow hood of a UP diesel almost black.
Even though I have switched to digital photography I still shoot black and white with it and add filters electronically using Photoshop. You can get some amazing contrasts that will enhance the photo without making it look fake or ‘off’. You’d be surprised at the amount of black and white photos that you’ve seen where a filter was used and you didn’t even know it because everything looked right.
Another factor to consider is if the image was made from a printed photograph, what type of paper was it printed on? Again, there are myriad types that provide different contrasts, looks or ‘feels’-how gray the grays are or how deep the blacks are just like the filters that can be used in creating the negative. It can get harder to pin down the further back in time you go because the standards become less. A century ago every photographic supply company had their own types of papers and chemical processes which had an effect on the final look of the print. Photo studios also had their own particular look. It wasn’t as uniform as take the picture, drop it off at the Fotomat and get a print back that looked like the real thing.
The irony of black and white photography is the multitude of possibilities it provides depending on how it’s implemented, it’s not as simple as just being-as the saying goes- ‘black and white’.
Tom Kline
Houston