Color photography prior to WWI -- Production of artistic casting

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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
Reply to
Ignoramus27020
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Samples of his work:

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jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

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.

Reply to
Pete C.

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.

Reply to
Al A.

On Feb 18, 3:00=A0pm, Ignoramus27020 wrote:

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

Reply to
stans4

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?

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b.w.

Reply to
William Wixon

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.

Reply to
William Wixon

Yes, it does feel as you described. I have seen some of the places pictured 70-80 yrs later, it is spooky.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus27020

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

Reply to
co_farmer

You might like this:

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It is the successor to this project:
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the variety of what he put in my mailbox, the postman probably thought I was either an anarchist or in the CIA.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Nice color. The first color TV's in the 40's were like that - Rotating wheel of color. Eye is strobed with white through a filter and when timed it was a color picture as the eye integrates three hits in a 'vision' time.

Mart>

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Reply to
Martin H. Eastburn

An electronic device of the 1970s-80s operated in a similar way to produce color film negative or a Polaroid photo from a single frame from video. Polaroid had a device to obtain a "hard copy" picture from video for medical, laboratory or other uses.

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.

Reply to
Wild_Bill

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