Agfa motion picture topics (Apr 1937-June 1940)

Telescope. 10 miles distant Photographed by Lyle Abbott attachment for the big tube. Aided by Life Magazine's Paul Dorsey, a special fitting was built to replace the telescope's usual ocular or eyepiece. At one end a massive ring clamped to the telescope tube. At the other was a fitting to bold a standard 4x5 Graphic plateholder with its dark slide. Tested out with conventional Agfa Superpan. the device worked to perfection. But there still remained the problem of piercing the veil of aerial haze which, especially over a big city, hides the distance. No practical combination of conventional film and filtering woidd do it. At this point Abbott secured a supply of an experimental cut-film coating of Agfa Infra-Red negative. This brought success at last, and one day this winter, readers of the HeraldExpress were treated to a panorama of Los Angeles’ Civic Center area, photographed on Agfa Infra-Red negative through the city’s most powerful telephoto lens. “The sensitivity of Agfa Infra-Red,” says Abbott, “is ideal for this purpose. The haze which gives us so much trouble when we try to make these shots with conventional films is composed very largely of ultra-violet and violet light, which is easily filtered out by use of a 29-F filter. In addition. the infra-red rays to which the film is most sensitive penetrate from a distance much more strongly than any \isible light can. “Another asset is the relatively high speed of Agfa's Infra-Red emulsion, especially w hen compared to the older infra-red sensitive plates and films which, slow in themselves, required the added use of a filter which was virtually opaque visually, and naturally increased the exposure enormously. In telescopic work, especially in anything such as this, where the telescope must be trained low and used through miles of atmosphere, Lyle Abbott 23