Kodak ad from December, 1948 Popular Photography magazine
Toronto. WW2 had ended three years earlier and the world was getting back to normal. Just a year before this December 1948 ad appeared, Ansel Adams took a photograph of mountain climbers on the top of Yosemite Park’s famous ‘Lost Arrow’ peak.
Kodak used their ad to tout the virtues of its then super fast Super-XX B&W film which allowed Adams to take the shot at a modest (for him) f/22 with a good depth of field (Super-XX was about ASA/ISO 200. The grainy Super-XX was replaced by Tri-X which was ASA 320, then ASA 400. With finer grain than Super-XX, Tri-X was open to push development increasing the film speed a stop or so.
Thank you to George Dunbar for his diligence in recognizing the historical significance of Kodak’s advertisement in choosing this challenging photograph taken by Adams for its ad on Super-XX film. I used a roll as a kid indoors at about f/16 and 1/25th – all my shots were terribly under exposed.
Note: The post title is a riff on the first line of Longfellow’s poem, “The Arrow and the Song“.
