100 year old color Russian photographs

[W K Longcor]

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.

[Mike Anderson]

Very cool. Some of it reminds me HDR technique, especially #3.

...Mike

[Paul Fitzgerald]

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."

[Dave Grenet]

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.

[sanking]

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.

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

[Lynn Jones]

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

[dperez]

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

[r_a_feldman]

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