I found a big box of old negatives/slides/prints that pretty much went back all the way to the beginning; 1972 for me. There must have been literally a football field's and a half length of negatives and slides in glassine sleeves (I usually did not mount my slides if I was going to print them, still don't) and 8x10 negative pages. In there I found a couple of sleeves with fireworks I took my freshman year in HS, which would have been 1974. The negatives were still in very good shape but I had to look up the code on the film strip to tell me what kind of film it was. It is Kodak Kodacolor II 100. I am sure you old timers will recognize that name! At the risk of sounding like the stereotypical grandfather who "walked 10 miles to school in the snow, uphill......both ways"........back then there was no internet, in fact except for the space program there were no computers. All we had to learn from trial and error on our part and two excellent magazines, Popular Photography and Modern Photography (later bought out by Pop Photo). There was a third, Peterson's Photographic but it was pretty lame compared to the other two. More photos and a lot less in the way of how-to articles and reviews.
I do remember reading a how-to article in MP describing how to do multiple time exposures of fireworks at night by setting the camera shutter to B, placing a black card in front of it and then opening the shutter and locking it with a cable release. Each time you heard the boom of the fireworks you took the card away from the lens. After the fireworks faded you put it back. And so on and so forth for as many exposures as you wanted to have in one frame. You had to use a short enough focal length lens to ensure you got everything in and then just cropped in the darkroom. Below are three such images I did with that technique. I processed the film using a Unicolor C41 Process kit and they still seem to be as vibrant as ever, even after 40 years.
I do remember reading a how-to article in MP describing how to do multiple time exposures of fireworks at night by setting the camera shutter to B, placing a black card in front of it and then opening the shutter and locking it with a cable release. Each time you heard the boom of the fireworks you took the card away from the lens. After the fireworks faded you put it back. And so on and so forth for as many exposures as you wanted to have in one frame. You had to use a short enough focal length lens to ensure you got everything in and then just cropped in the darkroom. Below are three such images I did with that technique. I processed the film using a Unicolor C41 Process kit and they still seem to be as vibrant as ever, even after 40 years.
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