Tale of an Orange Flame: In 1988 my then fourteen year old daughter, my wife, and I traveled to the Soviet Union. Specifically, in that short time before that system collapsed, we...

MosheR Loc: New York City

In 1988 my then fourteen year old daughter, my wife, and I traveled to the Soviet Union. Specifically, in that short time before that system collapsed, we visited Russia and Uzbekistan. This was not our first experience with a Communist regime, as we had been to China a few years earlier, and so had some familiarity with the cultural paranoia that we assumed we would have to contend with again.

As I write this, Joyce and I have been traveling together for over fifty years, and have been hoping to be able to continue doing so for the next few … as long as our health more or less holds out. One of the little projects I’ve had in mind after we stopped traveling, in the “very distant” future, was to digitize all the 35mm slides I took on the journeys we had taken between 1967 and 2002. (In 2003 I got my first digital camera.) This would be quite a task, as I have tens of thousands of edited slides to deal with. So when our travels were interrupted by the Coronavirus, I decided to use that forced hiatus to work on at least some portion of them.

This is where our trip to the Soviet Union comes in. One of the hallmarks of our travels throughout China and the USSR back then were the little old ladies we privately referred to as the “Hall Monitors.” I’m sure they had an official title, but I have no idea what that would have been. The hallways of the hotels of both societies in those days tended to be overwhelmingly long and, at each end, sat that little lady at a big desk noting who went into and out of each room. She probably didn't specifically recognize anyone, and certainly didn’t know any names, but she could count, and she definitely kept track of all the entrances and exits that lay within her venue and jotted them down in her little note book.

As I usually did, I carried two cameras with me on that trip … both Nikon F’s. The Nikon F of those days was pretty much the industry standard. In fact, it was my understanding that it was used by most National Geographic photographers because it was so very versatile and was built as solidly as a brick pizza oven. One of the cameras was kept loaded with a relatively fast, coarsely grained film, to be used when I knew I would be taking photos in low light places. The quality of the resulting photos would be “acceptable,” and was better than not being able to take any at all. (Remember, this was pre digital) The other camera would contain slow, but very fine grained film, which would render photos that would be as true and beautiful and perfect as a photographer could possibly want. This was the camera I would use most of the time.

On the fifth night of our trip, we left our hotel to see Georgian Dancers … Stalin’s Georgia … perform at Moscow’s glorious Tchaikovsky Theatre. I carried the fast film camera with me, and left the other one in a locked suitcase in our hotel room. Everything was fine when we got back, and I continued taking photos, mostly with the camera I had left behind that night, for the rest of the trip.

When we returned home I sent the film out to Kodak to be processed. When they got back to me, I was shocked, dismayed, and terribly saddened. All the slides that were taken with the camera that held the finer film from after that night were ruined. They each had a bright, flame-like orange streak shooting down from the upper left hand corner. (In vertical pictures, in which the camera had been turned sideways, that “flame” lay horizontally in the upper right hand corner.) This was awful, but what was done was done. The scenes weren’t totally covered by those “flames,” so Joyce and I decided to edit them anyway. They were spoiled, but they still showed where we were and what we did, and they would still, in the future, allow us our memories.

That’s where things stood for the next few weeks. Then we started getting letters from many of the people we traveled with: some from out west, many more from down south. Their photos from after that night at the theatre were totally ruined. Nothing. Nada. Blank. Not even the remnants of a memory. Then, a few months later, a cousin of ours went to Russia. She stayed in different hotels than we did and went to different places, but her pictures were also obliterated.

The only conclusion we could come to was that, in those last historic moments, just a few years before the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the powers that be did not want visitors taking even innocent, harmless photos of their country. Some person or persons must have entered each of our rooms. Remember; Those little ladies at the corners of the hallways always knew when we were not there. Then they picked the locks on our bags and did some kind of visually unobtrusive damage to our cameras … enough to allow light to leak in and destroy each roll of film we used. Thankfully, my cameras happened to be built like tanks, so relatively little harm was done to them and I still had useable pictures, even if barely so.

Now, more than thirty years later, I have digitized all those ruined slides. Basically, I placed them one by one in a holder I Jerry - rigged behind a piece of diffused glass, and rephotographed each of them. I have some modest post processing skills, and I am reasonably familiar with Photoshop so, with a little work, I was able to get rid of each of those “flames” and reclaim the memories from that long ago trip to two very interesting, exotic, exciting, and very beautiful countries. Happy ending!

Here are some before and after photos.

Stay safe,

Mel

(Download)

UTMike Loc: South Jordan, UT

Beautiful results, Moshe!

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thanks a lot. I try.

NMGal Loc: NE NM

Your post-processing skills are fantastic, to me. I have none. Can’t imagine what they did to cause the “flames” on your film.

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thanks for the nice words, NMGal. They probably stuck some kind of very fine sharp edged object into the cameras' backs and pried them up a bit, just enough to let some light in. Luckily, my Nikons could withstand the assault pretty well.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

MosheR wrote:

In 1988 my then fourteen year old daughter, my wife, and I traveled to the Soviet Union. Specifically, in that short time before that system collapsed, we visited Russia and Uzbekistan. This was not our first experience with a Communist regime, as we had been to China a few years earlier, and so had some familiarity with the cultural paranoia that we assumed we would have to contend with again.

As I write this, Joyce and I have been traveling together for over fifty years, and have been hoping to be able to continue doing so for the next few … as long as our health more or less holds out. One of the little projects I’ve had in mind after we stopped traveling, in the “very distant” future, was to digitize all the 35mm slides I took on the journeys we had taken between 1967 and 2002. (In 2003 I got my first digital camera.) This would be quite a task, as I have tens of thousands of edited slides to deal with. So when our travels were interrupted by the Coronavirus, I decided to use that forced hiatus to work on at least some portion of them.

This is where our trip to the Soviet Union comes in. One of the hallmarks of our travels throughout China and the USSR back then were the little old ladies we privately referred to as the “Hall Monitors.” I’m sure they had an official title, but I have no idea what that would have been. The hallways of the hotels of both societies in those days tended to be overwhelmingly long and, at each end, sat that little lady at a big desk noting who went into and out of each room. She probably didn't specifically recognize anyone, and certainly didn’t know any names, but she could count, and she definitely kept track of all the entrances and exits that lay within her venue and jotted them down in her little note book.

As I usually did, I carried two cameras with me on that trip … both Nikon F’s. The Nikon F of those days was pretty much the industry standard. In fact, it was my understanding that it was used by most National Geographic photographers because it was so very versatile and was built as solidly as a brick pizza oven. One of the cameras was kept loaded with a relatively fast, coarsely grained film, to be used when I knew I would be taking photos in low light places. The quality of the resulting photos would be “acceptable,” and was better than not being able to take any at all. (Remember, this was pre digital) The other camera would contain slow, but very fine grained film, which would render photos that would be as true and beautiful and perfect as a photographer could possibly want. This was the camera I would use most of the time.

On the fifth night of our trip, we left our hotel to see Georgian Dancers … Stalin’s Georgia … perform at Moscow’s glorious Tchaikovsky Theatre. I carried the fast film camera with me, and left the other one in a locked suitcase in our hotel room. Everything was fine when we got back, and I continued taking photos, mostly with the camera I had left behind that night, for the rest of the trip.

When we returned home I sent the film out to Kodak to be processed. When they got back to me, I was shocked, dismayed, and terribly saddened. All the slides that were taken with the camera that held the finer film from after that night were ruined. They each had a bright, flame-like orange streak shooting down from the upper left hand corner. (In vertical pictures, in which the camera had been turned sideways, that “flame” lay horizontally in the upper right hand corner.) This was awful, but what was done was done. The scenes weren’t totally covered by those “flames,” so Joyce and I decided to edit them anyway. They were spoiled, but they still showed where we were and what we did, and they would still, in the future, allow us our memories.

That’s where things stood for the next few weeks. Then we started getting letters from many of the people we traveled with: some from out west, many more from down south. Their photos from after that night at the theatre were totally ruined. Nothing. Nada. Blank. Not even the remnants of a memory. Then, a few months later, a cousin of ours went to Russia. She stayed in different hotels than we did and went to different places, but her pictures were also obliterated.

The only conclusion we could come to was that, in those last historic moments, just a few years before the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the powers that be did not want visitors taking even innocent, harmless photos of their country. Some person or persons must have entered each of our rooms. Remember; Those little ladies at the corners of the hallways always knew when we were not there. Then they picked the locks on our bags and did some kind of visually unobtrusive damage to our cameras … enough to allow light to leak in and destroy each roll of film we used. Thankfully, my cameras happened to be built like tanks, so relatively little harm was done to them and I still had useable pictures, even if barely so.

Now, more than thirty years later, I have digitized all those ruined slides. Basically, I placed them one by one in a holder I Jerry - rigged behind a piece of diffused glass, and rephotographed each of them. I have some modest post processing skills, and I am reasonably familiar with Photoshop so, with a little work, I was able to get rid of each of those “flames” and reclaim the memories from that long ago trip to two very interesting, exotic, exciting, and very beautiful countries. Happy ending!

Here are some before and after photos.

Stay safe,

Mel

In 1988 my then fourteen year old daughter, my wif... (show quote)

Good job restoring the photos and glad you were able to recover them. :)

Seems obvious someone peeked inside the camera. Just enough to see if there was film in it. Maybe they wanted to verify it wasn't a spy device. I shoot mostly digital these days but I also still shoot some film with my F100. I can verify it's not a spy device. LOL.

I wish I could say "we can be thankful that those days are behind us" but sadly it looks like we are headed toward those times again.

MosheR Loc: New York City

Unfortunately I absolutely agree with your last sentence.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

MosheR wrote:

Unfortunately I absolutely agree with your last sentence.

I had hoped the world had evolved beyond all that but recent events say otherwise.

Glad you were able to repair the photos. ;)

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thanks. So was my family.

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Your story is long for UHH, but it reads so very well is a great not so long autobiographical editorial. Indeed, Stalin was not a Communist in the defined sense... he was a paranoid dictator and the whole of the Soviet was infected... we see that in Putin.

Your resurrection of the flamed photos is a work of love. I have gone back to a 2000 cameras JPEGs and with our wonderful AI tools have made them sing as tho taken with new camera equipment.

We who have traveled must realize how different our lives are from the ultra-conservative farmer in Nebraska. In Richmond Va, I took my lead technician to Akron Ohio, that was the first time he had been out of the state... he was 40 years old!!

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thanks, dpullum, for the complements about my writing. I read somewhere that the world is a book, and if you've never gone anywhere, you've only read one page.

ecobin Loc: Paoli, PA

Really excellent processing - you're a master, Moshe!

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thanks. I'm not being falsely modest when I say that I'm certainly not a "master." It's simply knowing which programs do what to accomplish anything I did. No particular skills on my part were involved.

Earnest Botello Loc: Hockley, Texas

Great work, Moshe.

MosheR Loc: New York City

Thank you, Earnest.