October 15, 1944 Friends and Football, Sunday Drives and Film

                                                 
                                                            
 Dear Mother & Daddy,

"You're going to think I'm awful after promising to always write on time and then this letter being late.  There hasn't been a chance to write all weekend.  This was the week we were expecting company and Sully came about 6:30 Friday night.  We went out and ate dinner and sat up half of the night talking about school.  Bea came on the train early yesterday morning and it was one big rush straightening the house and getting dinner.  We went to the football game and had a real nice time.  It threatened rain all afternoon but it didn't and was warm.  Today the sun is shining but the wind is blowing and it's blue cold.  B has just taken the kids to the train.  They wanted to get to Sullivan's in time for dinner because this is Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan's anniversary.   (Yale, 27--Columbia, 10)

I got a new hat.  It's a close fitting tan one and is real nice and looks nice with my tweed coat.

School is fine.  I didn't have to teach Columbus Day so I spent it cleaning and getting ready for the weekend.

Our first Dames meeting for the fall season is to be Nov. 8 and we are making plans for that.

Do you ever get to take any Sunday drives?  Are the woods pretty now?  They are here.  Everyday when I drive to school I can hardly drive for looking at the trees and vines.  They are every color and simply gorgeous.  We have a roll of color film that we wanted to take autumn pictures with if we ever find any spare moments.

Kodak Ad courtesy of ebay

There isn't any news.  We are just fine and hope you are.  Tell Grandma that I plan to write to her if I can ever get time.  I think about her a lot.  Write soon."

                                                       Lots of love,

                                                                    B & Bonnie

NOTE from Ann:  Many of the photos posted on the blog are scanned from B's slide collection.  The color often looked over-saturated and sometimes dark.  If interested, see the information that follows from www.photomemorabelia.com.

Kodacolor Film in 1944
Because the dyes generated by the early colour couplers at that time were far from ideal, the colour printing paper was purposely manufactured to be of very high contrast to increase the colour saturation of the prints. Unfortunately, this meant that pictures taken in contrasty lighting conditions, bright sunlight, or flash-on-camera, produced prints with dark shadows with no detail or white, burnt out, highlights.
To alleviate this problem, from 1944 an extra emulsion layer was included, between the yellow filter layer and the green sensitive, magenta dye forming layer. This layer acted as a “positive mask.” It’s function was to decrease the contrast of the colour negative as a whole but without any loss of colour saturation.
The actual layer itself was a black and white emulsion, sensitive only to blue light. It was too slow to be affected by the camera exposure, it’s speed being much the same as a Process film or Line film emulsion. Process film was a slow speed, high contrast, blue sensitive film, used for copying black and white line originals, and for making positive transparencies from soft black and white negatives. It was faster and less contrasty than Line Film. Line film was a very slow speed, very high contrast blue sensitive film for making line negatives from architects and engineers plans and drawings. Both films had various uses in photolithography.
As a result of the positive mask layer, the colour negatives appeared rather “heavy” regardless of exposure and required a longer printing exposure. It is believed that processing of the film took slightly longer because the mask layer had to be developed separately to the three colour sensitive layers.
After processing the mask held back some of the light projected through the shadow areas of the negative. Since the mask added density to the shadow areas, less light could reach the printing paper from the shadow area, so the printing exposure could be increased to put more detail into the highlights of the print, thus lowering the overall contrast. The mask only added density to the shadow areas of the negative.
Kodacolor film with the black and white mask was marketed from 1944 to 1949.