This photographer may have been a relative of Uncle Earl.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/201...stPop_Emailed1
Printable View
This photographer may have been a relative of Uncle Earl.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/201...stPop_Emailed1
I really would like to know what camera was used to make those photos. Three exposures in rapid succession, with a different filter for each. I had seen a photo of WWI Russian troops made with this camera, and I was really impressed.
I imagine that the film must have been in a rotating cassette, and the filters were synced to it.
Fantastic! I had no idea that colour was so advanced in those days. Notice how you get the colour fringing where there's motion (like the river) and the 3 colours couldn't register. Thanks for the post.
Thanks for the link, that has some new photos I haven't seen!
There's some rudimentary info in the wikipedia entry. He exposed three B&W frames with red, green and blue filters. I think he used the same camera for them so the models had to be very still probably for a minute or two. For exhibition he used three separate projectors with the same filters, and had to have them in register on the screen - not unlike early home movie projectors with separate RGB lenses. The info I've been able to find doesn't tell how he made the color postcards which apparently were very popular, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian C. Miller
The photos are gorgeous at web resolution, I'm dying to see these in person - hopefully there will be an exhibition nearby some day.
I asked on LL forums if anyone knows if there's a technical reason he used RGB, or whether it's a coincidence that he used RGB and we still use it, or just a legacy thing. Didn't get answers to that.
Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera that took three successive exposures vertically on one long plate. The camera used gravity to move the plate. The plate was inserted via the top of the camera. After the first exposure through the first filter, the plate dropped down into the middle position and the second exposure was taken through the second filter. The plate then dropped into position for the final exposure with the third filter. I believe the filter was changed automatically, but I don't remember how this was accomplished. Attached is a picture of one of the three-exposure plates in the Library of Congress collection.
--
Rick
Amazing! I thought from your title this would link to some Autochromes, which I love. But they have their own look and the colors are somewhat unreal, which is part of their attraction. But I'd forgotten there was another process to shoot color. I love the look of these shots. Not only are they beautiful, unreal color, but the plates are technically very, very good. I'm sure we've all seen the usual historic black and white shots, where subjects are grainy, blurry, poor exposures. Everything looks so "old" and primative. These shots catapult you back to that time, as if it were yesterday.
A very informative article on Prokudin-Gorskii can be found on this web page:
http://www.ica.org/en/node/30480
Download the file "Adamson&Zinkham.pdf" from this page.
One interesting fact, from the "Postscript" paragraph, states that a color laboratory founded by Prokudin-Gorskii's grandson Dmitri Swetchine, Central Color, was still in business in Paris in 2002 when the article was written.
--
Rick
Fascinating images! Amazing quality for their day.
I knew about these, but it's always nice to see them again. What a strange feeling, to see that the world was coloured even a century ago. We tend to imagine the past in black and white. :)
I wonder how he made those self-portraits (unless somebody else operated the camera, in which case they're not exactly self-portraits).
I think the camera had to have a clockwork mechanism for its operation. It must have regulated the shutter action and rotated the filters. Too bad it is probably lost for good. But since so many strange things have been found hidden away, who knows?
A beautiful full color book - I believe called "Photographer for the tsar" was published maybe 25 years ago -- all photos different from those on this web site. If I remember -- there was an explanation as to how the camera functioned in the book.
Very cool. Some of it reminds me HDR technique, especially #3.
...Mike
I did not think anyone had panchromatic plates before WWI, I guess I was wrong, very wrong.
from Adamson&Zinkham.pdf:
"The earliest color pho-tography process, it was based on Thomas Young’s theory of color vision. In 1802 the English scientist had argued that light is composed of three primary hues-red, green, and blue (R-G-B)-and all others in the visible color spectrum resulted from their varied mixture. The theory was not successfully proven until 1861, when Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell created a scientific sensation by producing the first color photo-graph. At a scientific meeting in London, Maxwell projected three diapositives (positive glass slides) of a multi-colored ribbon that had been photographed successively (in black and white) through separate R-G-B filters in front of the camera lens. In front of each of three magic lanterns, he placed a similar color filter, so that when simultaneously su-perimposed on a screen, the color separations synthesized to form a multi-colored im-age."
Except that Maxwell's result was a fluke. His 'red' exposure was actually a UV exposure because the filters he used didn't attenuate the UV well enough. See this article by Ctein on The Online Photographer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Grenet
Ctein did not discover this, did he? I thought that the reason for Maxwell's apparently successful result had been known a long time before Ctein's article.
Sandy King
Hi all,
I love this work (working photographer and professor for 63 years)! The science was either hypothesized or proven in the 1800's by Helmholtz, Maxwell, and du Hauron. It wasn't practical until 1903 when Agfa's, Miethe, created the first "panchromatic" emulsion. The Lumiere Brothers created an actual RGB system called "Autochrome". Color could be done by three separate exposures on pan film or plates and RGB filters, simultaneously on motion picture film by Technicolor, or "one shot" still cameras such as the "Curtis Color Scout". The prints at that time were dye imbibation (Dye Transfer or Technicolor. Obviously the first "integral tripack" color film was Kodachrome in late 1935 created by Mannes and Godowski under contract to Kodak.
Lynn
What's interesting is that little is known about the physics behind this phenomenon. See lecture by MIT phyisics professor, Walter Lewin. About 1:06 into the lecture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVvt...e_gdata_player
There are a number of other threads about these photos, for example http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=39715 and
http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=15600 .
Searching for "tricolor" brings up many more threads, such as http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=33801 .
Lastly, take a look at http://trichromie.free.fr/trichromie/ for good contemporary examples.
Bob