Incredible 100 year old colour pictures from Russia

[tecumseh]

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Fantastic colour photos from tsarist Russia. The near natural colour effect is caused by a clever use of filters.

 

 

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

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[Robert J]

The very first colour photos were made almost 150 years ago,in the 1860's.Like the Russian ones,they were created by shooting three exposures through colour separation filters.At the time they could only be viewed by projecting the image.There were various camera designs that utilized beam splitting prisms to expose the three negatives simultaneously.

[tecumseh]

Indeed. A description of the process here

 

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii's Negatives - The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii PhotographicRecord Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)

[adan]

Interesting. I thought these would be Autochromes (a color process also available 100 years ago).

 

The early experiments Robert mentions did not catch on because until film (or plates) could be made panchromatic and sensitive to red light, the colors were alway skewed. Pan film wasn't regularly available until about 1900 - which is when the Lumiere brothers put it to use in Autochromes - and just in time for Prokudin-Gorskii.

 

Early versions of Technicolor also depended on separately-filtered images being recombined into a full-color "print" for projection.

 

Tri-pack color separation cameras (4x5 or larger - Robert's beam-splitters) were used for studio work right up through the 1940's. Still used in some high-end 3-sensor video cameras today.

 

One of my photo professors in the 70's shot color-separated negatives directly from nature to make dye-transfer prints, precisely to get the weird color effects caused by moving elements (water, clouds) in an otherwise motionless scene.

 

Autochromes used one exposure, with the color filters (tiny grains of tinted cornstarch) embedded on the plate - in effect, a precursor to the Bayer color filter overlay used on digital sensors 100 years later.

 

Leica content: One of Leica's 1930's lenses (73 f/1.9?) could be used with a striped red/green/blue filter to capture color in one exposure using an early Agfa process.

[tobey bilek]

How do you think Hollywood made Technicol movies? Gone with the wind for example.

 

They used a 3 strip projector with tricolor filters to play it back. Can you imagine getting 3 in register on a theater screen and then having the three play in sync. I have no idea what what hapens if one strip breaks.

[adan]

Projectionists really earned their money back then

 

Actually, by 1928, the projection prints were a single piece of film with full color produced by essentially the same process as dye transfer still images. Laying down three colored dye images on top of one another in register from three different originals.

 

Of note: Technicolor actually revived the dye-print process for some recent films, including the computer-animated Toy Story - just for its particular "look".

 

Technicolor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Doug A]

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These photos are a wonderful object lesson in how we should be recording the people and places around us so others can see them 100 years from now.

 

--Doug

[colin_d]

They are amazing photos. Do we know what type of camera he was using? Some of them have a 3D quality.

[tecumseh]

"There is no known replica or illustration of the camera that Prokudin-Gorskii used. It was a view camera of his own design.". The 3D feel is caused by the three overlapping images being a little off centre from one another. Not sure if they would come up as 3D...

[Guest mc_k]

"There is no known replica or illustration of the camera that Prokudin-Gorskii used. It was a view camera of his own design.". The 3D feel is caused by the three overlapping images being a little off centre from one another. Not sure if they would come up as 3D...

 

I'm not sure; the most three-dimensional images I've ever seen are in movies from that decade. I think they had some fine things available in those days--lenses, films, and techniques.