Most of the images we have from the historic events of the 1930s and ‘40s are black and white, so I’m fascinated when I come across pictures shot with early color films.
Like this photo of a torchlight parade of Nazi Storm Troopers during the 1938 Party rally in Nuremburg.
A little Internet research revealed Agfa applied for a patent for its first color film – Agfacolor – on April 11, 1935. Four days later, Kodak in Rochester, N.Y. applied for a patent for Kodachrome. Kodak won the ensuing patent fight to become the first commercially available color film.
Agfa introduced Agfacolor Neu (New Agfacolor) in November, 1936. As best as I can determine, the early versions of Agfacolor had an ISO/ASA rating of 5, so slow that it couldn’t be used to photograph athletes in action at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Agfa was able to boost the ISO/ASA rating to 25 in 1938 and that’s what I think was used to make the photos here.
Judging by the sharpness of the buildings, relative to the SA men, I think the camera was mounted on a tripod.
I also ran across some color photos from a Storm Trooper Christmas dinner in 1941 where the main light source was candles on the tables.
Here again, the photographer got remarkably good images in very low lighting conditions on extremely slow film.
I was able to tease out more detail with Photoshop, showing that the film recorded much more than was apparent at first glance.
I suspect the images were made with a camera fitted with a very fast (for the day) 50-55 mm lens capable of f/1.8 or better, but that’s just a guess because I haven’t found any information about lens speeds from the 1930s and ‘40s.
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