Photo Story: Sunset From the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland in 1968.

Kodak Retina iiiC

Schneider 50mm F2 lens

Kodachrome slide film (either ASA 25 or 64)/Scanned

Sunset From the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland in 1968

In my last post I included an image from the Aletsch Glacier showing the Hotel Berghaus at the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland, the highest (at the time, and presumably until it burned down) hotel in Europe at an elevation of 11,000-ish feet. During my two months living and working there, afternoons and evenings were often socked in with clouds.  But occasionally we had spectacular views and sunsets.

The photo below was taken in the evening, in July or August (I was only there in the summer) of 1968, sometime after dinner. Obviously at this altitude, the sun sets late!  

One thing which the photo could not record, but which I remember distinctly, was the sound of cowbells in the valley below. Even on clear evenings (i.e. not socked in with clouds) like this one, it was often too windy to hear anything but the howl of the wind. But, on this particular night, the air was still, and the view looking west and the sounds from the valley below had me smiling.

My Dad's Old Kodak Retina IIIC

In recent days I have been thinking a lot about my dad.  He passed away in January at the age of 90.  He had a good life.  He was devoted to his wife Jean, and she to him. And he was an awesome dad.  As is expected, I have frequent and unpredictable moments where I find myself lost in my memories of him. They’re all good. Nevertheless, the first holidays without him will be difficult.

When it comes to photography, he was the one who got me interested.  It wasn’t intentional on his part.  I just loved his camera and the images he created with Kodachrome slide film.  

No one did a lot of photography back when I was a kid.  Certainly there were professionals, but I don't think families generally owned cameras.  Or, perhaps they owned one Kodak Brownie or Instamatic. But Dad came back from Europe in 1955 with a German-made Kodak Retina IIIC, a rangefinder style 35mm camera with a 50mm F2 Schneider lens.  This was an expensive camera, though as I recall it was bought by serious shooters who could not afford a Leica. 

The "Retina" is beautifully made...German engineering and German craftsmanship the way it used to be.  It was a gorgeous tool. And I loved the Kodachromes he made with it.  

Below is a photo of his camera.  The shutter seems to be working well, as is the light meter.  Amazingly, there is no battery required! Not even for the light meter. How that can be, I do not know. Unfortunately I have recently discovered that the viewfinder is a bit cloudy, making it impossible (nearly) to find exact focus. 

This old camera has great meaning to me.  Even though it hasn't been used in years (my last use was approximately 1975 and I don't know when dad last used it), Kodak Retina IIIC serial number  277759 has a permanent place in the family.  A reserved seat at the table.

Most of the memories I have of my dad and this camera were of slides taken in the mid 1950s as we drove from Massachusetts to California (and back to Massachusetts a year later) through many national parks.  

Below are a few photos scanned from his slides. They are low resolution files for blog posting.  Higher resolution files can be viewed on my photography website, here:

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p379961508

Yellowstone

1955 Chevy.  No seatbelts, until my dad himself installed two in the front bench seat.

Incredible.  This  is the end of August in Yosemite Valley.
Today it is so busy cars are not allowed

Crater Lake
(My mom bought us clothes we had to grow into!)

Niagara Falls

Bryce Canyon

Yosemite

Yellowstone

Yellowstone

Splicing together two kodachromes from 1966 (thank you Photoshop!)

Photoshop CS5 is so awesome.  I am almost entirely a Lightroom man, but I do go into Photoshop for three things: (1) panorama stitching, (2) the content-aware tool, and (3) cloning.  The first two features are not available in Lightroom and the third feature, cloning, is far superior in Photoshop in my opinion.

So, here is today's story:

Last weekend I was "digitizing" some of my dad's Kodachrome's from a trip to Europe we took together in 1966.  He used a Kodak Retina IIIC rangefinder camera.  With just a 50mm F2.8 lens, and film rated with an ASA of 25,  many today would view his camera as "limited" in the images it could create.  On the other hand, neither of us knew anything different, so it was quite adequate.

Visiting the Cathedral at Chartres, France we actually thought it was pretty cool that the structure was so large and tall that he couldn't get it all into the viewfinder.  I remember enjoying the slide show we created that first showed the bottom half and then showed the top half. 

When I saw last weekend that the two slides had significant overlap, I was hopeful that I might be able to splice them together into one vertical image. I didn't let myself get too hopeful about the outcome, however, once I noticed that the bottom picture was in horizontal orientation and the top picture was in vertical orientation. 

So... without doing any editing to the images, I decided to challenge photoshop.  I exported the images from Lightroom to Photoshop.  Photoshop did all the rest, automatically.  Below are the two original images and the result from Photoshop.





Next, to create a finished product, and since I couldn't crop the bottom half to fit the top half, I used the "content-aware" tool to fill in the sky in the top half.  It just took a minute or two.  I am happy about the photoshop "content-aware" tool, because I know nothing about layers and all that other good stuff that most power-users of photoshop know.

At this point I still had some fill in some additional sky.

Lastly, after saving the file as a .tiff and bringing it back into Lightroom, I made some other adjustments, such as a slight rotation of the image and some color adjustments.  I am sure more can be done, but the final image below is good enough for me (and my Dad likes it too!)

A few samples from my Dad's 1955-1956 Kodachromes

In my prior post I outlined the procedure I am using to duplicate my old slides.  But I started with a set of Kodachromes taken by my dad when we left the Boston area and drove out to Los Angeles, where my dad worked in 1955 and 1956.  Below are several of my favorites from that batch of slides (I'm the bigger of the two boys):