Apparently, someone named ergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii invented
a certain method of color photography and took a number of pictures of
Russia prior to WWI. The method involved taking three pictures with
three different color filters. I believe that at the time they had no
way of combining the color, but the photo plates were kept and
developed in the United States decades later.
i
Samples of his work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography
jsw
Very cool.
I believe you are incorrect on that last part, the "Making color
images..." page on the site indicates that the images were shown in
slide shows using a triple projector with the matching three color
filters.
Wow, interesting. My wife's grandfather had a few still-life photos
hanging in his home years back. They were bowls of fruit or something
similar, nice, but not really remarkable. I remember asking him about
them one time, as I knew he had studied photography and film making in
Germany before he came to the US, just before WW2. He described a
process similar to this, taking 3 photos of the same thing through
filters, then combining them when you made a print. He said that when he
made them, it was a tricky process for a do-it-yourselfer with a pretty
low yield. It took a number of tries to get a good print. While they
looked unremarkable now, they never failed to get comments at the time
he made them, when he and had them hanging in his office.
Thanks for posting that.
There were lots of ways of getting a color photo back then, just that
most were inconvenient, or slow or both. Autochrome was one method,
involved colored grains of potato starch as a three-color mask layer
over a regular glass plate emulsion, was a lot slower than the slow
emulsions of the time due to the filtering, but could be developed
using regular photo chemicals of the period and when properly done,
left a color positive that could be projected in lantern slide
projectors. Another method was the tri-pack camera, used three
regular plates and three color filters, one lens with mirrors and/or
prisms inside to divide up the image. These could be printed using
carbro or other non-silver printing methods, the camera was bulky and
the printing was a long and messy affair,but could be done. I've got
WW1 color photos that were reproduced in a recent history. Not action
photos, stills and posed stuff, but still, period color photos. There
are several books that detail all the early history of color
photography, it DIDN'T start with Kodachrome! One thing about those
early tri-pack photos, they didn't depend on organic dyes that
eventually faded away. Technicolor was a similar silver-based color
method. If the emulsion and backing is still intact, the three silver
negative images can still be processed to give true color even today.
Amateurs without the money for a tri-pack could invest in a heavy
tripod and the three color filters and then take three shots in
succession using the filters. They'd have to make sure that the
camera didn't move and mark the negatives as to what filter was used
with each in order to get a decent print, it was done, but too much
fiddling around for only still-lifes for most.
Stan
holy (expletive deleted)! that's amazing, incredible, awesome. gorgeous.
like some sort of weird time warp.
clicking around, found someone's blog with a link to, i think, the full
collection?
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
b.w.
oh, sorry iggy, i was clicking and clicking and didn't notice your link was
from that collection. thanks for posting. very wonderful photos. you can
kind of fall into them.
b.w.
Yes, it does feel as you described. I have seen some of the places
pictured 70-80 yrs later, it is spooky.
i
The GREAT depth of field is caused by a VERY small apature lens.
Perhaps even a pin-hole camera. Everything is in focus, from the very
nearest object to the furthest mountain.
Great photos! Thanks, Ig.
Paul
You might like this:
http://www.russianlife.com/
It is the successor to this project:
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/culture/soviet-life/index.htm
With the variety of what he put in my mailbox, the postman probably
thought I was either an anarchist or in the CIA.
jsw
Martin
There were 2 basic versions available, with either a special 35mm film
camera, or a special Polaroid film camera attached.
A color video signal is connected to the black box, a color video monitor is
used to preview the selected frame of video, and the attached color film
camera would produce a color image on film.
This doesn't seem so unusual at this point.
The device would freeze a frame of video that the user selected, and within
the black box the frame was displayed on a high resolution B/W monochrome
CRT.
The user could see the selected video frame on a separate color video
monitor, and could make changes to color, contrast etc, then choose to save
the image on color film.
Since the color image was being displayed inside the black box as a B/W
image, the box had a rotating mechanism directly in front of the camera that
held filters of red, green and blue.
The device would sequence through the 3 RGB filters, while the
electrically-actuated camera would make 3 exposures for a single film print.
I seems like an odd and cumbersome (and expensive) method today, but the
device was apparently widely used. There were many of these units being sold
on eBay about 8 years ago.
--
WB
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