Tintypes to Digital
For those interested in technique
Cameras, Film, and Digital Reproduction
Byron Harmon began his career as a photographer in the 1890’s. Photography was in its infancy but gaining popularity. He built his first camera from plans in a magazine.
Tintype to Photogravure
One of the “films” he used was a tintype plate: A tintype, also known as a melanotype or ferrotype, is a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal… coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype
Tintypes were the snapshots of their era, allowing people to acquire a photograph of themselves and loved ones quickly and inexpensively. These images were one-of-a kind and were small. They could not be enlarged, as with film negatives, but could be reproduced using Photogravure, one of the most beautiful techniques for printing photographs ever invented.
Read about it at: Art of the Photogravure
Byron’s first publication, Indians of the Western Prairies: photo-gravures was reproduced from his tintype images.
Glass Plates and Sheet Film for Large Format Cameras
From his earliest days in Banff, Byron photographed with a 5x7 format camera mounted on a wooden tripod. Initially he used glass plate negatives, (a sheet of glass coated with a photographic emulsion) but quickly adopted the new sheet film which was just coming on the market. He also experimented with a panorama camera, a stereo camera, and cameras which accepted film packs but the 5x7 format remained his favourite throughout his career in the Canadian Rockies.
He was also a cinematographer and loved setting up self portraits of himself with his movie camera, photographed on his own 5x7 camera by someone in the party he was travelling with who exposed the film and pressed the shutter.
Hand Colouring Black-and-White Photographs
Hand colouring photographic prints for sale or reproduction and lantern slides for projection, was a skill not every photographer had, or needed. Byron hired local women who cultivated this delicate art in both photo-oils and watercolours to do this work for him.
Ascending Poboktan Pass, Photograph hand coloured by Nora Drummond
Colour Photography Joined the Marketplace
Before colours in nature could be reproduced, the nature of light had to be understood. In 1666, by directing sunlight through a prism, Sir Isaac Newton was the first to demonstrate that light contained a combination of colours. Experiments for producing colour photographs began in the mid nineteenth century. Several techniques were invented of great beauty but all were in a rarified world of experts and long complicated processes until Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky invented Kodachrome. In 1922 they joined with Eastman Kodak research laboratories in Rochester, N.Y., to develop their ideas. The first commercial Kodachrome film went on sale in 1936 but wasn’t widely available until after World War 2.
A Short History of Colour Photography, National Science + Media Museum, UK, is fascinating reading.
Don Harmon Embraced Colour Photography and Reproduction
In the late 1950’s, Don Harmon introduced colour reproductions of landscape photographs to the tourist market in the Canadian Rockies. He used his fathers cameras, then graduated to a modern Linhof View camera. He mainly used Ektachrome Film.
Roll Film Cameras Liberated Photographers
Don also used a Rollei medium format camera which employed roll film. This allowed freedom from tripods, in many situations, especially for aerial photography which Don specialized in during the 1970’s, while photographing the Columbia Icefield from a helicopter.
Tap and zoom to see a few film types above. Clock-wise from bottom left, they are:
5x7 inch, silver halide, black and white sheet film
35mm colour slide film, aka reversal film
4x5 inch colour reversal sheet film
120mm colour reversal roll film, 6x6 cm format
4x5 inch colour negative film
Two frames of 120mm colour reversal roll film, 6x6 cm format
From Analogue to Digital, Carole Harmon Innovates
I have photographed with an old fashioned 4x5 wooden view camera, medium format Rollei film camera, medium format Hasselblad digital camera, and a Leica 35 mm. camera. For the type of landscape images I was taking when working in the Canadian Rockies, and have chosen for this website, I mainly used my 4x5 and medium format cameras. Like my grandfather, I believe photography is an evolving art form requiring changing equipment and techniques. I have also done several major projects involving the photographs of my grandfather, Byron Harmon
Rescuing Byron Harmon’s Negatives, 1970’s
Incendiary Film
Flexible film in the early twentieth century, including still and motion picture film, was made of a thin base of cellulose-nitrate coated with a photographic emulsion. This base was flammable. Under confined storage conditions it released gases which further attacked the base, sometimes causing spontaneous combustion. This self-destructive property, unknown at the time, was the cause of fires in movie houses of the early twentieth century, possibly including Byron Harmon’s movie theatre in Banff which burned to the ground in 1917.
In Mountain Light, The Photography of Byron Harmon 1906-1934
My grandfather’s negatives were stored in a wooden filing cabinet in deteriorating paper envelopes. After completing my two year photography course I was acutely aware of the danger they posed to themselves and to the building they were stored in. I was also newly aware of their importance in the history of the Canadian Rockies and Canadian photography.
Funded by grants from Canada Council, Riveredge Foundation, and Byron Harmon Photos, I produced Direct Duplicate negatives of my edit of the most significant images in the collection. I printed reference prints on Kodak’s vintage Azo contact paper. My family donated the Byron Harmon collection to the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff.
I curated and printed, In Mountain Light, The Photography of Byron Harmon 1906-1934, which opened in Banff in 1978 at the museum’s Peter Whyte Gallery and toured North America. In collaboration with the museum, Great Days in the Rockies, The Photography of Byron Harmon 1906-1934 was published by Oxford University Press.
Overcoming Contrast Problems
The film used in the early twentieth century was very high contrast, difficult to print on modern enlarging papers. I struggled with this problem when printing In Mountain Light.
In the late 1990’s I produced a series of twenty-two images from the Byron Harmon Collection as gold-toned Printing-out Paper prints and sold them at my gallery/store in Banff. This paper was a relic from the late nineteenth century, revered for its long tonal range, archival qualities and beauty. It was a contact printing paper requiring printing negatives to be produced from the original negative by Chicago Albumen Works, the only company in the world which still worked with this paper, producing work for artists and museums. The french company producing the paper ceased production in the early 2000’s. An attempt to produce it in England was a failure, (I was one of the test printers for this new paper). I was forced to give up this popular project.
Overcoming the Dust of Ages
Over the past several years I have turned my photographic practice from analogue to digital, both with my own work and ongoing projects with my family’s photographs. This website is my latest project.
Dust and scratches are the bane of photographers. Repair work with knives, retouching fluids, and brushes were the old way of improving a negative. There are those who believe old photographs should be reproduced with their dust and scratches preserved, as testament to their period, and their long lives. I respect the argument but can’t live with the results.
Byron used the old fashioned retouching tools which gives me the permission I need to do my utmost to present his images in as beautiful a manner as I am able.
I produce high resolution scans with an Imacon scanner. I do repair work in Photoshop. I have not found the new “dust and scratches” filters to be effective on these images so I repair them painstakingly, one scratch at a time.
Carole Harmon
2025