Cool old picture

[Henry]

I also recognized the young Lew Ayres. In later years he appeared in four episodes of the original "Hawaii Five-0," among many, many other TV credits; see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000817/filmoseries.

As for the film used, this image is very contrasty: the shadow areas are completely blocked up, while the highlights (windows, reflection on table top) are blown out. It's a difficult challenge for any film to deal with an extreme range of lighting such as this, plus there's no telling how many times this particular image has been reproduced: we may be looking at a 2nd or a 200th generation copy, and copying generally degrades the image quality every time it's done if you're making copies of copies of copies, etc. My favorite b/w film was Panatomic-X, followed by the old reliable Plus-X after Kodak, bless their hearts and R.I.P., ditched the Panatomic, but I doubt that these were available when this picture was taken (late '20s-early '30s?). I daresay that either film, if properly exposed, would have handled this lighting situation somewhat better. But it's great to have this image, nevertheless. Thanks for posting!