So, I’ve been watching alot of atomic bomb test footage from the 1950’s. And almost every single time the background is black, Is this because the cameras are shooting on black and white film?
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Yes, and because the cameras are filing through thick dark filters to be able film the test. If they were exposed to the light of the test directly the film would be totally blown out and destroyed.
To film the really intense bright light, it gets filmed through a dark filter. Like taking a picture of the sun through sunglasses.
Filters are the answer, very dark filters to cut down the extreme brightness created by a nuclear blast, enough light gets in to see the blast but all other details aren’t bright enough to make it through.
Firstly, yes. They are mostly shooting in B/W, but also consider that the cameras are trying to take a photo of a nuclear explosion. Imagine for a second just how bright that is.
The cameras are set up to essentially ignore most of the ambient light because once the explosion happens, something orders of magnitude brighter is going to hit them and they need to be reader for it. In order to get a clear picture of the explosion, they need to basically let in as little light as possible.
Can you post a video or picture so that we know what exactly you’re referring to?
Otherwise, I assume you’re talking about the footage of the explosion itself and of the buildings getting damaged. If so, then the explosion is simply so very bright that it would glare everything out. To compensate for that you need to adjust how much light can reach the film, basically dimming the brightness until the nuclear explosion is no longer too bright to make details out. But then everything else is so dim, and dark it’s basically black.
It’s a combination of dark filters and exposure. A nuclear blast is insanely bright so it needs a very dark filter to be able to see anything other than just white.
Look at photos/videos of welding or the sun. It will be very similar.
The real reason the backbground is black is because the exposure time was very, very brief. Microseconds or less. This was done with a [rapatronic camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera) which used an electronic shutter that could take extremely short exposures. It did this without any moving parts.
The bomb is very bright and there simply isn’t enough time in a microsecond for enough sunlight to be exposed on the film to be seen.
Other people have the answer about the dark filters…the light is so bright you’d bake your film. Another interesting thing about the tests is the vertical lines of smoke in many of them. I considered them pretty odd and unnatural, so I looked it up. They’re from rockets launched just before the test so the researchers could track the shock front of the explosion.
The basic answer is that it will depend on the lighting conditions that the camera is tuned towards. If it is trying to make the shape/structure of the early fireball visible, the contrast will have to be very high, because the fireball is so bright that it will wash out the rest of the scene. It takes several seconds or more before the fireball is dimmed to the point of being a similar order of magnitude of brightness as the sky. If you combine this with the black and white film and the fact that many of these tests were done in the early morning, you end up with lighting conditions that come out as black on film.
And, depending on the footage you are looking at, the cameras may be particular attuned for the first few milliseconds or the first few seconds of the fireball. Most nuclear mushroom cloud photos that people are interested in are of the first few minutes at most. “Late stage” (upwards of 10 minutes) nuclear footage is rarer and less common in media. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g35KDFazIic) is an example of “late cloud” footage, compressing maybe 10-15 minutes of footage into a minute or so. You can see the initial brightness in the beginning of it. This test was early in the morning (around 6am, just before sunrise), so the background was also possibly dark to begin with.
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