this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Silver iodide plates don’t respond to red light. They respond better to blue and violet. That alone doesn’t cause the problem but it’s part of it. I can’t remember where I read that tho
Without special lighting black people became a dark void. You could photograph them with special lighting and different techniques but that mostly wasn’t done.
So I think it’s fair to say it didn’t work well for darker skin tones because in order to get a picture with similar quality you had to work a lot harder.
I do agree in the later days it was more a specific caused by racism but from the beginning it was more difficult to photograph darker skin tones and no one really cared because of racism. I wasn’t caused by the racism tho. It was caused by the technology at that time… that no one cared enough to fix it.
That mentality carried on until I believe the Kodachrome made all the world a sunny day. I’m not an expert tho.