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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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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