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Color Photography with B&W Film
DrPsycho writes: "Saw this linked on memepool and it just blew me away. The Library of Congress website has an exhibition section which features the works of Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). Yeah yeah. Big deal, you say... until you realize his original B&W glass-plate negatives were created using a clever RGB filter system which he used almost 100 years ago. A little modern "digichromatography" ... reapplication of the filtered colours and combining them into a composite colour image... allows for stunning full colour reproductions! Not bad, considering by how long it predates the release of Kodachrome colour slide film."
Read more in "The History of Color Photography" by Heinz Richter at http://www.f32.com/articles/article.asp?artID=128
heh, low slashid :)
-- frank
Like you say, _you_ didn't read the website.
He had a projection box to display the images in colour.
Go look at the website, the pictures are quite stunning.
...j
Absolutely the colors on some seem to be out of balance with what we expect to see. Some of the plates, because of a slight time lapse, have rgb artifacts becuase of moving objects.
I choose to believe that some of the brilliant colors may stand out because the colors that were being recorded were absolutely amazing. Some of the blues in the architecture section are stunning, and the beauty of the scenes are touching and beyond words.
This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen posted on slashdot in months.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
$500? Hell, i'll sell mine for $400... and it's a lot lower than yours. How dumb is this? you could probably bribe rob to give you an even lower one...
A painting really only portrays the artist's stylized view of the world- and with a limited palette. This could have certainly been a painting- but a photograph gives such striking detail of EXACTLY how the scene was at that exact moment. An artist can only hope to capture every possible nuance- the expression on his face, every intricate detail of his coat. Besides- even if it was a very good painting- it's still not the same. It goes from "a pretty good idea" to an EXACT representation of what was there.
I would like to see a painting of this that could capture all the details there. It's just not possible to freeze an instant in time like this- where the lighting is JUST perfect, and the reflection is just right. It would take an artist days or weeks to reproduce that- and days or weeks is NOT freezing an instant in time.
The realism of all these photos is what is so amazing. Black and white photographs and paintings give you a somewhat removed idea of what was actually happening. Looking at a picture like this you can actually envision the scene there as though it was yesterday- but it wasn't yesterday, it was 100 years ago.
Computers have gone a long way towards being able to create realistic scenes- but even the untrained eye can pick out sophisticated computer generated imagery. It doesn't take a fraction of a second for your brain to go "that's fake." The same can be said for just about every painting I've seen- and I've seen a lot of paintings. There's something that can't be synthezised by human hand or computer that a photograph can capture. I for one completely understand what the original poster meant. It truly is a shift in the way that I see the world "before color".
Paintings and other art forms have their place. Whoever it was that said "a picture is worth a thousand words" is right- both in the sense of a photograph and a painting. They just say different things. A photograph can be the most unbiased eye, and a painting could never hope to be this way.
If all it takes for you is to see people in funny clothes, lots of wood, and poor building codes, try travelling to some of the poorer areas in Asia, Africa, or India some time.
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Do not anger the worm.
Let's see... I can't speak for India or Africa cause I haven't been there, but I have travelled quite a bit in Vietnam, China, and Thailand. I studied abroad in China for a year.
Small cities in Vietnam -- ie NOT Saigon and Hanoi. There are Mekong Delta tours from Saigon that will take you to really great minority areas along the Mekong. And travel anywhere on the train.. My god, the trains... ugh.. I took the train from the Chinese border to Hanoi. The trains go through some real remote places.
China outside any of the major metropolitan areas. For maximum "different-ness" go to minority areas. But for it to really work well in China you have to be able to speak the language, or be with someone who can speak the language. Anywhere you can go on a real tour with an english speaking tourguide isn't going to show you much. If that's out of the question, southwestern China (Yunnan specifically) has quite a few spots that are real backpacker friendly. Plenty of books about backpacking in that area.
Also, Thailand. Bangkok is a fricking super metropolis, but even there if you go on the outskirts, there's some pretty interesting stuff, like hundreds of people living in the crack between the riverbank and the paved road.. And I saw some wonderful things in northern Thailand, like Chiang Mai (I'd recommend the Banana Guesthouse to anybody thinking of going there). Even on tours with an English speaking tourguide (backpacking tour). They took us hiking all over the national park up there, and we slept in minority villages that have pretty much remained unchanged for many many generations.
If you just get out into the world and travel you can find some remarkable things.
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In contrast to what you are saying, this is from three different exposures (probably in addition to any slight angle differences as well).
From the site:
"A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter."
Before saying other people are wrong, try reading the site.
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The same idea (multiple shots onto monochrome stock via colour filters, recombined at the projection phase) has been independently rediscovered several times, for still and moving images. See, for example, Thomascolor at the Dead Media Project.
My own interest is that a member of my family, Juliet Rhys Williams had her own system, called the Morgana process, which she managed to get Bell & Howell to pilot in the 1930s. Her mother, Elinor Glyn the racy novelist, had connections with Charlie Chaplin, Hearst etc and was able to provide contacts in Bell & Howell to get the project off the ground.
The prototype had a 3-color spinning filter and ran ordinary monochrome stock at triple speed. The projector had a similar filter. When this proved impractically fast for a production model, B&H designed a near-natural colour process involving a two-colour oscillating filter, targeted at amateur (wealthy) home-movie freaks. This went into production and my father remembers using one as a boy in the early 1940s.
Its achilles heel was that the colours could easily go to hell if the film was spliced. But if the 3-colours-on-monochrome Morgana process had become popular instead of colour stock, it would have solved the problem of fading colour movies. It would only be necessary to replace the filters as they faded.
It'd be difficult to do, not sure if it would have been possible at the time even in the best of conditions. For the reasons I stated earlier, I'm pretty clear that that is not what was done.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
Right result, but I think you have the wrong reason.
The grass is green, but the previous author is right, there are non-green wavelengths coming from the grass, and there would be color fringing of the grass, particularly in the bright highlights, if the blurring of the grass was due to movement.
However, I believe the grass is less than perfectly sharp because it's just out of focus from being too close to the camera.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
There are several reasons to believe that it's not lens flare, but the simplest one is that the sun is in back of the camera in the shot you indicate, and you need direct sunlight on the camera lens to get lens flare.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
It's not even clear what's meant by a 'pure' red filter, filters pass some range of colors with different transmission characteristics. But being pedantic aside...
So, lets assume that you have colored filters (sure) that act additionally as a polarizer and a partial-wave plate (pretty much science fiction stuff for the era we're talking about). As a photographer you'd be sad about that, by the way, you can't afford the 50% light lossage you'd pay in terms of even longer exposures. But let's just take that as an asumption. Okay, so we're out on a limb, but if we buy into all those assumptions, do you actually get the water effect shown?
Nope. :)
If you had simulatanious polarized pictures of the same scene through the same lens (did I forget to mention the amazing work with at least four prisms that would be required to make this work?), you would not get the same effect. The areas that were brighter and darker between the different planes would be correlated in a different way than they are, the visual effect would be quite different. You'd have color fringes surrounding water highlights instead of the softer flowing effect.
Still, it's fun to try and think these things out.
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
If you look at the pole, which is not shiny, the artifact that an earlier poster pointed to has color fringing. Since the pole is not shiny, your explanation doesn't explain that behavior. Since other nearby objects are not fringed, it can't be a parallax thing or poor registration of the color layers.
That suggests movement. If that were true, and the pole were planted, you'ld expect the fringe to grow as you approach the top of the pole, which it does if you examine the picture closely.
The sharpness of the pictures suggest that they were taken through the same lens. Were they not, parallax fringes would be apparent all over the place, and there'd be no good way to correct that. So the light for the three image planes came in through the same lens.
But we know that each film section was exposed through a different filter. So either the filter was changed (automatically or manually) between each frame, or he invented complex third-silvered mirror appartuses. The former is a lot more technologically believable.
Finally, people can be still with practice for long exposures. B&W photographs from the mid-19th century demonstrate this on a regular basis.
I stick by my original belief that the color fringes are related to small differences in the time of exposure between the different color layers. (On the order or a fraction of a second to a couple of seconds.)
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
You missed my comment about parallax. If you have multiple lenses, each has a different perspective on the scene, and when you try to align the images you end up in a world of hurt in terms of color fringes on everything. We don't see that, so the images must have been taken through a single lens.
I am quite aware of what polarization is. True polarization filters (called "linear polarizers" in the photo biz) align different frequencies of light in the same direction. To get any color-dependent effects you need the modern marriage of a polarization filter with a quarter-wave plate or such, what is normally referred to in the photo biz as a "circular polarizer". These are pretty complicated pieces of technology, but I use them in my photography business, I photograph water all the time, and they don't introduce those artifacts in one-lens cameras. If you insist on a three-lens camera as an explanation for what's happening, then you have yet to answer the issue of parallax.
I agree that there is a loss of sharpness in the grass. I do not agree that that is a time-exposure effect. The grass in that photo is much closer than the rest of the picture, it is my belief that the grass is close enough to the camera to be very slightly out of focus. This is totally consistent with my experience (I have a second business doing nature/landscape photography.)
--Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
I wonder -- will our world look so stragely 2D to the people of the future?
- Tal Cohen
They somehow remind me of the photos from the Pathfinder mission even though I'm not sure if the original images were RGB seperated. The camera (IMP) did have some filters and they did a fair amount of processing on the images, including combining images for 3D stereo (in color). I remember the first pictures to be greyscale, though.
One of the main reasons why these photos are of such high quality is simply the size of the exposed film. The photographer was using a 3"x3" sheet of film (glass actually) for each color. Compare with a modern color camera using 35mm, or the even smaller APS format film. Large format cameras have a huge quality advantage over 35mm cameras. You wouldn't want to use one for shooting an ice hockey game, but for lanscapes, portraits, surveys, and the like they are wonderful.
There's a nifty page about Technicolor's three-strip process at http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or6.htm
OK, so the photos from the period were black and white, but what about the paintings, both from that period, as well as earlier?
Since perhaps the color paintings were largely replaced by B&W photos some time ago, does that mean that there's only a specific timeframe that was 'in black and white', instead of 'everything older'?
I just don't understand what is so profound about this.
Even better, just modulate it until it is out of the audio frequency range. This is how stereo signals are broadcast, and I think this is also how the additional two tracks are recorded on quadrophonic (sp?) records.
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Another interesting wrinkle in the stereo broadcast scenario. The baseband (unmodulated signal) is actually R+L, while the modulated signal is R-L. This way, a monaural receiver plays both channels and a stereo reciever can seperate the right and left signals.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I don't beleive he used three lenses. My reading of the article describing his process is that he used a single lense, and moved the film two times (three frames) using the three colour filters. Yes, there was an illustration of a three-lensed camera.
In particular, the article mentions how he had to change filters "in rapid succession." This sounds like a single-lense situation to me, otherwise a single mechanism would trigger three shutters simultaneously.
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He had a single-lense camera and a triple-lense projector.
Should have read the entire article first, instead of just browsing it...
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He had a single lense camera and a triple lense projector. I've double-checked: what everyone is thinking was a camera is, in fact, the projector.
This is one of the major problems with the Internet: it's a "skim" media -- the visual analogue of the soundbite -- and it's so very easy to end up misinformed because one didn't actually pay close attention.
The article re: how the fellow did his work *clearly* tells us that he used a standard-issue camera, taking three pictures in succession. The *one* image of a three-lensed machine is, if one actually reads the text, the projector that he used to combine the three images.
So, no, the colour fringing isn't parallax, perspective or any other such thing: it's caused by movement, because there was a time interval between each shot.
What leaves me remaining curious, is whether the colours are true to life, or have been exagerated. I simply don't expect turn-of-the-century fabrics to be so boldly and richly coloured! They look fake to me... but there's every chance that they really were those colours. True dyes on natural fiber must look more colourful than printed dyes on synthetics...
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Read the background materials. It's worth noting that the images weren't made into prints in those days. Rather, they were shown with a special projector with separate red, green and blue beams aimed at the same spot, just like all pre-LCD projection televisions and video projectors. Very clever.
In constrast to what other people are saying, this is not from three different exposures. If that were the case, people would probably have stange outlines of color around them from the thre different exposures. (Not to mention how hard it is to load another sheet of film into a large format camera without moving it.)
:)
It is three simultaneous exposures. The reason why the water looks the way it does it because of the very precise angles involved in spectral reflections. The lenses for each color were only inches apart. However, that variance is enough to cause the precise area of the spectral reflection off the water to shift for each lens.
This would be more obvious if he had taken more pictures of shiny objects. However, to this date, the average Russian still owns little in the way of shiny objects. Besides, they would show a flaw in his process.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
What is interesting about his approach is how CHEAP it was. Rather than trying to reproduce color images, he reproduced black and white plates that would be projected with colored light.
He avoided the problem of movement between exposures by using three lenses, each with a red, green or blue filter. I'd like to see how a closeup still life would come out. Each color would have a slightly different perspective on the situation, causing some strange distortion, This is known as parallax and can be an issue in rangefinder (non "through the lens") cameras - what you see through the rangefinder isn't quite what you capture through the film when close to an object.
Variance between the different projectors, light sources, and the varying qualities of color filters would, however, make it nearly impossible to get consistant results.
These images definitely have their own feel to them. Strangely, the website doesn't say anything about a real life exhibition of them. Perhaps they didn't make prints. seeing them in person, up close, would reveal more about how the results of the process.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
I think the out-of-phase coloured bits may have been caused by movement of the subjects. IIRC from reading the article, the three separations were taken *almost* simultaneously.
One extremely benificial aspect of this is that black-and-white film is extremely stable compared to color film. Black and white film uses metallic silver (expensive yes, but stable) and is an archival medium, whereas modern color films use dyes that are extremely quick to fade and degrade. Even a film as recent as the first Star Wars movie required extensive cleanup to restore to its original colors.
Some early computer graphic films used black-and-white images, step-printed (one frame of red, then green, then blue) with the colors combined later in an optical printer. My first computer graphics effects (Solar Crisis) was step-printed with the color image followed by the opacity image. These were again used on an optical printer to merge the CG with the live action.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It's not movement, since the grass blades in the foreground are blurred without any coulour fringe whatsoever.
That said, the method used is just like Technicolor, except that it doesn't use dichroid mirrors.
And one will also recall Polaroid's polavision (official dope), which used a film striped with RGB filters. But videocams made that obsolete overnight.
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That sounds exactly like photography in the early 1900's.... Notice in some of the photos that there are rainbow effects (notable ones were a picture taken close to a moving river, where the water ends up rainbowed, and another taken of a large area with people moving in it, where there are rainbow shadows of people who moved between colors).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
That reminds me of Blade Runner, looking at Rachel's personal photos. Having the one where they are sitting on the porch suddenly move was a great shocker.
But think of digital picture frames and digital cameras today, which can express and capture a notion of time. It's not unreasonable to think that in 20 years, we'll have a printing process (digital paper) that is lifelike.
There was an expirament done in Germany in the early 1900's of stereo sound. Two phone lines were hooked up and the receivers were placed in front of the Opera stage. Some miles away, people were asked to put two phone receivers to their heads and listen.
Apparently, it was marvelous.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
History link here
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
"Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!! :-)"
...and NewTek did that for the Amiga 15 years ago!
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
Using filters for colour photography is nothing new. In fact, that's the most used method of all, particularly when you look deep into how colour film (in particular, Kodachrome!) works.
Look at astrophotography, for example. Almost all colour pictures of the sky is created this way -- you take three different B&W pictures through different filters.
TA
I'm not sue whether or not its the process that was used to take them or the way that they were scanned, but I can't help but marvel at the clarity and quality of these images.
Black & White film has always been shown to be able to produce higher contrast and sharpness than color images, and I can't help but wonder if using this kind of process isn't a better method of producing color photographs than what we traditionally use. But these images are just so clear and so lifelike that I can't help but wonder. (and if this process was used today, we could most likely eliminate the "artifacts" in color-shifting that others have noted by making the simultanous lenses much closer together)
But even if it was just the scanning process, I have to say these images are still incredible..just to be able to see this time in history in such vibrant realism, is incredible.
-Julius X
-Julius X
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Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Without knowing the optical characteristics of the filters used, a precise reconstruction is impossible. But, having looked at the results, the sky looks sky-colored. The grass looks grass-colored. The colors look quite appropriate in large portions of the images. What do you mean by hyperrealistic? Too good to be true?
Yes, they have tried to correct for defects in the emulsions, but the result appears to be quite accurate.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Since the images were meant to be projected the levels would need to be adjusted for brightness. It's not like they invented colors and painted them on there. The prints are probably extremly close to what the scene actually looked like.
Actually its a result of the images being taken in rapid succession, instead of simultaneously. Thus any movement in the picture causes slightly different images to be taken for the RGB channels and you get strange color artifacts. For a similar effect just offset the RGB channels of a photo in Photoshop (or Gimp). Kinda trippy.
If you go to the "how they did it" page, you'll see they did some extensive "color correction," or as we normally call it "photoshopping." check out this
However, the colors in at least some of the pictures "just don't seem right" to me. Is this due to mismatches between my monitors RGB and the original filters, degradation in the emulsion, or other artifacts of the original process?
Unfortunatly, I couldn't find more info on the restauration details; anyone knows any links?
Wow I had forgotten completely about the Digiview. My little brother and I used to make (monochrome) 3-D photos with that thing -- take a picture w/ the red filter on, move the lens a few inches and take another w/ the blue filter. All you need are some 3-D glasses and you've got instant 3-D!
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
There are a few other things that make these pictues look unusual. One is that many of them have a very high depth of field. The other is that they are high resolution with few dust-marks. I suspect that is partially due to the fact that there are three films and thus three times the resolution in some sense. Also, any marks in one plate could probably be repaired using information from the other two.
--Ben
i don't think that this is true. the loc site says
also, the images show artifacts, eg. in the ripples of the water, that are easily explained by motion, that i don't think would be explained by slight differences in perspective. perhaps the "invisible" blue green man (mentioned in another comment) is an even better example.
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Hey, I was floored because I'd only ever seen grainy old B&W photos of the giant steam-powered spider. Even if it was computer-generated, I still feel like I travelled back in time.
Rick
p.s. "Wow that's amazing! Huh...I'm bored."
should be the motto for the 21st century.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Actualy, acording to the making page, the photos were takens with the same lenses in diferent times. He quickly took three pictures each with a diferent filter. He then used a three lenses projector to compose the images in color.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Re colour represenatation, I was thinking along similar lines.
It occurs to me that we have reference points, though. Skin tones, grass, sky. Different diets and environments will affect the first two a bit I'd expect, but the third should be roughly constant.
Anyway. It would seem that we would have relatively accurate colours... They don't appear the same in all the photos and they'd be altered depending on what colour illumination was applied to each transparency, clearly, but they don't appear to be very far out.
There's a clear difference between the photos, though. Some almost have the appearance of (very well) recoloured B&W in some places.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Simply amazing. It's amazing how much color leads to complete immersion...
What helps is a complete lack of roads and power lines
I wonder what kind of advances in media there'll be in the next 100 years.
I can just see them trying to perform some kind of 3d or holographic reconstuction on our media. Or better sound. Or maybe whacko stuff like feel or smell or something.
How could we add extra information or dimensions to what we capture?
Does anyone here know if it's possible to obtain prints of any of these pictures?
Calmacil
I can't seem to face up to the facts, I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax... --Talking Heads
There is a book out there with WWII photographs done using the same method.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The length of the exposure is the reason nobody smiles in early Daguerreotypes and photographs. It was easy to held a stern expression than a smile, apparently.
dave
I saw a superb series of photographs once: stark black and white images of desitute men and women, weatherbeaten faces ground down by despair, broken people ground down by life. I though it was from Depression-Era US. It turned out to be Northern England in the Mid 1980's.
The photogrpaher's choice of medium can have a tremendously powerful effect.
dave
Some friends and I spent several hours in a basement once, as one of us desperately tried to sit still long enough for the camera to grab our portraits, while the others tried just as desperately to make him laugh.
In all of the pictures that we eventually captured, we're all sitting there with exaggerated frowns because we were trying so hard not to lose it. We look like a bunch of hoods
Good times.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
i presume this is because of movement between the 3 images being taken... so the water (rapidly moving i assume) is in different positions between the exposures.
Yeah, i think that was caused from the fact that the camera worked by taking 3 photos very quickly, with different color filters. So the points of reflection on the water shifted, as it has a tendancy to do, with each photo, giving an individual red, green, blue color that doesn't overlap.
Just pointing out the obvious.
Still amazing.
That's exactly what I felt when I looked at them. It's tough to look at them and simultaneously appreciate how old they are. It just doesn't seem real somehow.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
...wonderful!
The images are stunning - what I found most beautiful about the images is the perspective they put on the time. I have always enjoyed looking at older B/W photographs, but for some reason, for me, most of the people in them don't look happy - I don't know if it is the B/W nature, or if it is the long lengths of time they had to stay still, or if they truely are unhappy, or what - the drearyness just gets to me.
But here, even when it is plain the people have a hard life (like the "riverboat" guy), they still seem like they are more - I don't know - real/alive/(happy?). The quality of this work, even if it has been touched up, is more in the composition and subject selection - but the color brings it all together.
It is a shame we don't have more color work from this era and before - I noticed aside from clothing style, not much seperated those people from me or any other individual.
On a different note...
The Amiga (and later, the Tandy Color Computer 3) had systems for digitizing images using black and white camera systems with filters, then combining the images to produce "full color" images (on the Amiga, via HAM mode, and on the CoCo 3, via a rapid assembler routine coupled to the vertical blank, rapidly showing each image in succession while updating the palette - very tricky work with the GIME chip there!)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
...For some reason, when I see these pictures of people that (probably) had a hard life, their lives do not look nearly as bad in color as they do in black and white... I almost wish I could have lived during a time when there was only B&W photographs, to give myself a better perspective on reality.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Whoever said computers were the average /.'er's only interest? Photography is every bit as hackable, as long as you don't limit yourself to point-and-shoot cameras and 1-hour minilabs. The equipment's a bit more expensive, though, especially if you want to do your own color printing (enlargers with dichroic heads are somewhat spendy...last time I had access to one was in high school 13 years ago).
Besides, I don't even have a basement, and my vision's better than 20/20...no glasses. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
The pictures are gorgeous.
Color photos of a time long forgotten.
I'v always enjoyed looking at old black and whites (black and yellows are more like it) and wondered what the real colors were.
Pictures of Native Americans especially. Knowing the colors used in the artwork that has managed to survive this long, I'm sure the photos would have been terrific.
So, with some prior art, think Kodak will change some of their "history of photography"?
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Looks more like too much light on the subject (the little boy) Notice that one of the subjects in the middle of the group has a similar flair on her, and at the same angel.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Don't feel too badly.
The buildings probably look that way from the washing out of the process--there was heavy photoshop "interpretation" of what the color balance should have been. The truth is that wood and coal stoves were used quite often then, and they made things look just as grimy and ugly. However, being a more thinly-populated and economically depressed era/region, there weren't as many of them.
It's fine to be an environmentalist--I am--but that doesn't mean you have to give up technology or economic progress. Taking our current population back to the technologies of the time would result in more, not less pollution.
The mantra, as always, should be "fission now to power our way to fusion later."
Actually, it *is* from three different exposures. Notice how there are "ghost people" in some pictures, and how some of the little children look. There's one shot where you can clearly tell the kid moved his head between shots.
Look at the "Russian Children on a Hillside" picture on this page: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ethnic.html
Still *very* cool though...
Eh, it's really not all *that* hard. Take the "blue" image, paste into the blue channel in Photoshop. Do the same for green and red. Line them up. There you go! Of course, lining them up can be a bit tricky sometimes, but all in all it's not really that tough.
As to why the sample picture looks so different pre-corrected - I don't know. I didn't try that one, although I did download the neg for the self-portrait, and it came out almost exactly like how they have it on the site. Not too much color correction...
The article explains that he did take three images in rapid succession.
I felt the exact same way, To me it's almost as if i've travelled in time and taken pictures, bringing them back with me..
However, Imagine if some images of more familiar sights from that time period would be revealed in just as much glory..
When I was growing up, the only television we had was a small, black & white unit. The one show our family watched probably more than any other was "Little House on the Prairie."
Now, consider that this was set in pre-1900's. Most of the pictures from the early years of photography were all b&w too. So in my mind, Laura Ingalls and her family had a grey barn with grey cows and grey horses and they went to school in a grey schoolhouse (which doubled as a -- you guessed it -- a little grey church). Now if I were to see LHOP on a color TV, it would screw everything up in my mind.
On the other hand, every movie I've seen that's set in ancient times (The Ten Commandments; Ben Hur, etc.) I've seen in color, so I guess maybe there was only a short period in history where color was lacking. Some of these movies were made on "early" color film, so the colors aren't as bright and vivid as real life. If we look at stuff on videotape from the 70's, even there the color is not so great -- either we have better CCDs now, or there is magnetic degradation on the tape. This seems to create the sense that we live in a more colorful world today.
(Only in the last 20 years have we seen advancements in color film to the point where the color balance and saturation is really accurate. Lighting also has a lot to do with it, too.)
And then there's The Wizard of Oz, one of the very first color-separation films produced. Even though it was made in the 30's on B&W film, with proper color-combination techniques, we can see an accurate color balance, proving that things were just as colorful back then.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Note that the 1909 photography described in the article used optics to split the image in-camera, so it's just a single moment in time. He didn't have to take three successive shots.
Also, the 3-strip Technicolor process for "Gone with the Wind" and "Wizard of Oz" had three strips of B&W film in the camera, but the final prints were a single strip. Technicolor had what they called the "dye-transfer" process which placed successive layers of dye on top of a strip of B&W film to produce the color image. Sort of a CMYK printing process, except it was RGBK. It was a great process that produced some very vivid colors, and because the dyes were more or less permanent inks, the prints lasted for a long time without fading.
Technicolor recently revived the dye-transfer printing process for feature film releases. If you saw "Family Man" last year, there was a chance you might have seen a dye-transfer print. (Look for the reel-change marks in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. On a dye-transfer print, they are translucent green, instead of the normal black.) I also read a news article that said the re-release of "Apocalypse Now" later this year will be dye-transfer. I'm really looking forward to that.
Free Hans!
This is fascinating - from both an artistic and a geeky point of view.
From his photo "Storage Facilities for Hay" in the architecture section, you can start to pick apart the process that he used... By knowing the simple fact that smoke/steam rises, and examining the clouds - you can see rainbow-like effects.
What this really shows is that not all 3 layers of exposure glass (film) were not taken at precisely the same moment. In fact, it's backwards of how we even refer to color... it's most clearly Blue, Green, Red.
- passion
The black and white (monochromatic) plates used at this time would have been of a non panchromatic type. Panchromatic film has a response to visable light of a large range of colours.
No matter what the apparent quality of the images, they can only be valued as representations of the colours, not anything approaching the 'true colours'.
These photographs are vauable for thier existance, to for thier technical merit, or even artistic (they are not good).
The wars, revolutions, and disasters that have traversed the landscape since the time of these images, makes them a valuable historical curiosity.
The work of John Joly, and the Lumire brothers are much more interesting from a technical and innovative aspect.
I wonder what the timing was between the exposures? Seems interesting that in some cases substantial movement occurs between exposures, but in the same shot most people look very sharp, as though they didn't so much as twitch between the exposures.
In the self-portrait by the river, the water, unlike everything else in the picture, seems... blurry, oily
That's because the water is moving fairly quickly. It looks like an overcast day, and was probably a fairly long exposure with a small aperture. Thus, all the movement in the water gets, in a way, averaged out. The result is a fairly soft matte effect in contrast to the surrounding landscape. Very common, even today, when taking pictures of this kind of water motion.
The real reason we're only seeing this now is not because of some ingenius RGB separation, but rather some serious KGB separation.
how to record stereophonic sound on a monaural tape recorder...
simple, really: just digitize it...
Take a look at pictures or descriptions of the large industrialised cities of the time. They were notoriously filthy. I'm not saying that today is any better, it's just that the chemicals we use are far more insidious. But the major cities were covered in the byproducts from steam engines, industrial manufacturing processes, coal fires in people's homes. This is why Clean Air acts were passed in many places. London was terrible for its peasouper fogs and on at least one occasion in the nineteenth century Parliament had to be abandoned due to The Great Stink (smell coming off the polluted River Thames, people just pumped domestic and industrial effluents straight into it).
Actually many (most?) digital video cameras from prosumer on up use filters to seperate out RGB elements and direct them to different CCDs. This allows the full bandwidth of the CCD to be applied to one spectrum, effectively increasing the number of significant bits that are captured.
The photographs were retouched to remove defects. See http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html
And the funny part of it is, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work!
As McLuhan said: "I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."
(Actually your post was interesting. I just can't help rehashing the Annie Hall quote whenever I hear anyone invoke McLuhan)
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Yes, this was probably the Rephotographic Survey Project which I think was the first large-scale undertaking of its type.
There's a book (details escape me at the moment) that reproduces very small sections of daguerrotypes made in the US the early 1860's. In case you're not familiar with this process, daguerrotypes record an image at the molecular level, rather than, say, at the level of a silver halide granule. This gives them an astounding ability to render details, limited (I believe) only by the resolving power of the lens. Lenses of the time didn't have a hell of lot of resolving power, but the results are remarkable nonetheless.
One I remember in particular is a tiny portion of a panaoramic shot showing the passengers on the deck of a small steamboat. These people, of course, didn't know they were being photographed. For that matter, the photographer was concentrating on a much larger view and may not even have been aware of them. This lack of awareness is pure magic! Time travel! I love it!
From a technical standpoint, colour separations were probably a lot more likely at that time than anything like Kodachrome. (Actually, RGB is the basis for many modern colour systems as well.)
What I find astounding is that people actually figured out that a separation could produce full-colour images at a time when there were no real scientific antecedents. That takes real imagination!
There's something quite eerie about these photographs. It's as though in our mind's eye we really think that the world in the Victorian era was sepia-toned and monochrome. It's a shock to think that in fact, in terms of natural subjects, it looked much like it does today.
If you find this kind of time travel interesting, you should investigate the various "rephotographic" projects in which the sites of well-known historical photographs are identified, tracked down, and photographed again from a viewpoint and under lighting conditions as close as possible to the original. When you see this stuff, you start looking for the things that have changed. Again, it's a shock to see how little a hundred and fifty years adds to many subjects.
Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong site - I thought this was slashdot.org, not slashdot.us.
Silly me, confusing TLDs like that...
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Did you save it and zoom in to get a better look at his face? Or wonder what the blurred guy on the opposite river bank was thinking?
Those pictures had quite an effect on me... I wonder what Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii would think if he knew we were pondering them a century later, using a computer across a global network (I'm in the U.K ).
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Secondly, here's a quote from the page explaining how it was done:Shown here is one of the thousands of glass plate negatives made by Prokudin-Gorskii. The negatives served two purposes. Primarily they were used to produce positive glass slides for his illustrated lectures about the Russian Empire. Prokudin-Gorskii projected the slides through the red, green, and blue filters of a device known as a "magic lantern" which superimposed the images onto a screen resulting in a full-color picture.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Also, it's rather common practice to do a little tweaking of pictures; a little dodging and burning (oh, and adjusting contrast, too) in the darkroom (or, more and more commonly, photoshop) is part of the process when doing a print.
Good luck finding a single photograph that shows the original scene exactly as it were, colors, contrast, and all.
-pf
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I had one of these. It worked exactly the same way as this. You aim the camera, trun the filter to the right colour, grab, turn to next colour, grab, turn to last colour, grab, and DigiView composited the three images into one.
Of course your subject had to be still for the entire grabbing process (and this was sloooooow) which limited it's usefulness.
You could also get a device (I think it was called a roboview) that would turn the filter for you.
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James Sleeman
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
From what I recall, and from what I can find on the web, it was the physicist James Clerk Maxwell who created the first color photograph in 1861. See, e.g. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/photos/chron .html. Fox Talbot is responsible for many other innovations, however.
There was pollution, but it was the kind that came out of a horse and you managed to step in with your nice shinny shoes!
There's no pollution on the buildings because the photographer chose to photograph nice areas. In the industrial areas of this time (and since the beginnings of the industrial era), soot and other easily detectable pollutants were horrible, far worse than anything you'd find in the U.S. today.
I don't know if this was done a hundred years ago, but I know that in astrophotography, this method is very common. While this is probably done with B&W film, CCD camera pictures are taken this way. (Hey, it's the 00's man.) A notable example is the HST. A plethora of you probably know this, but I felt like reminding you. BTW, I can't imagine the fore-mentioned method being much more difficult than standard B&W photography was a hundred years ago.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." ~Confucius~
If you look at that photo, he does not appear in blue, but he does in the red and the green. If he was just wearing something that didn't show up in the blue filter, the resulting picture would reflect what was there. For example, a blue shirt would look black under the red and green filters, but white under the blue one. The resulting combination would show a lack of color for red and green and a lot of color for blue, resulting in a blue shirt that looked exactly like the original.
In any event, you can clearly see the background behind the man in the blue filter, so he just wasn't there. As to the color of his shirt, if you combine red and green but not blue, it looks remarkably similar to the shirts worn by the man second from the left and the man furthest right, so I'd wager it was red.
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Just a thought: Do people who are colour blind feel the same way we do about past photos?
I experienced exactly the same thing you described when looking at the pictures - it's like you suddenly realise that the world did exist and everyone in it was real so long ago. It's incredible. I'd be interested to hear if colour-blind people have always felt the same way we used to wrt old photos, or do they feel the way that we do now?
The interesting one is the guy to the right. In the red channel the guy is scratching his face; in the other two his arms are down. Very apparent what's going on.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Anyone got an idea of what the parallel lines are in this pic are?
Switching from red to green to blue makes the image almost like an animated GIF... you can see the trees sway and the clouds go by....
Not only are these photos in color, they also give you a sort of moving picture of nature in the scene.
This stuff is amazing...
Prokudin-Gorskii patended his method in England, in 1922. More specifically, he patented the optical system allowing to get 3 negatives simultaneously using 3 colored filters.
I found this information on the "Most important inventions in phorography" page, at http://www.photodome.ru/History/History2.html (unfortunately for the majority of slashdotters, the page is in Russian)
mimimal research shows Maxwell did this years before this dude was born.
Even worse, this has absolutely nothing to do with color film (kodachrome).
Lame, Lame, Lame. Let's all rewrite history.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
When I look at this exhibit, it really puts things in perspective. This man has given a wonderful gift to the ages; a gift that will stand the test of time.
I dunno... it really shows how insignificant DeCSS and the RIAA are in the grand scheme of things...
You hit it on the head. This exhibition is nothing short of amazing in its ability to help me to relate to these times. Many of the pictures, especially the one of the rail bridge, look as they would today. Some of the pictures such as those of the turbines and other machinery bring me back to my childhood (I'm only 25) and my dad bringing me to power plants that were built around this time.
I'd kill to have prints of this stuff. :)
--- Brent Rockwood, Development Lead
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
Here is a very good and very thorough article regarding the history of color photography. After reading it I really started to wonder why the user of color photography took so long to catch on with the masses.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
The single most shocking thing about these, aside from the fact that the color bridges the generation gap, is seeing how pristine the centuries-old buildings appear in these photographs. Back then, there wasn't the kind of acid rain or soot on the buildings to tarnish them. It's shocking. A church that's 800 years old looks like the day it was built to my eyes, and that most of the wear and tear that I'm used to has occurred just within the past century.
It's almost enough to make me, a staunch Republican and proponent of the internal combustion engine, into an environmentalist.
I think everyone will relate to what you said (very well!)--but if anyone has trouble, try imagining Pedro Martinez pitching to Babe Ruth. Even though the game is substantially unchanged over 100 years, I just can't do it.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
1900s No CCD stuff yet (but good steam technology)
You can find large JPGs and TIFFs of everything that the LOC has of Mr. Prokudin-Gorskii at this link or here for just the color photographs.
You can also order high-quality prints of these images as well.
props to Ben for finding this.
zsazsa
There are some interesting artifacts of the process. Look at the water in the second photo set. Or the top half of the pole.
Well, one of the things you have to remember is that these pictures were recomposed by experts using state-of-the-art technology. It's pretty unlikely that they looked this good when they were being shown with the projector system. I tried recomposing one of the pictures from the b&w samples they had on the site. And while it worked, it didn't look anywhere near as nice as the pictures on the site. Some image expert spent a lot of time to make those pictures look nice.
And I have to say I'm glad he did. Those photos are simply amazing.
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I didn't have any trouble lining the images up. It only took me about 5 minutes or so
The quality of the images wasn't anywhere near the quality on the site. Parts of the images were washed out on certain channels, and not on others, causing colored gradients where there were not supposed to be.
No, recomposing the images isn't hard. But once you do it, you won't have anything like what is being displayed on the site, try it yourself and see, or try reading about what was actually done with the images on the site.
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
so in theroy, I could take my single CCD kodak digital camera, hold a red transparancy over the lens (with camera on tripod), snap a photo, hold a blue transparancy over the lens, snap a photo of the same thing, and then a green transparancy over the lens, snap photo. Upload photos, stick transparancies in laser printer, photo edit each image to a grey scale (digital camera takes pictures in color only), and then print out each image onto their respective transparancies, line up three overhead projectors, line them up properly, and shine them onto a screen, and have a full color image? Sure the left and right OH projectors would be at slight angles, but in theroy, it would produce an image, right?
moox. for a new generation.
I could take my single CCD kodak digital camera, hold a red transparancy over the lens (with camera on tripod), snap a photo, hold a blue transparancy over the lens, snap a photo of the same thing, and then a green transparancy over the lens, snap photo. Upload photos, stick transparancies in laser printer, photo edit each image to a grey scale (digital camera takes pictures in color only), and then print out each image onto their respective transparancies, line up three overhead projectors, line them up properly, and shine them onto a screen, and have a full color image? Sure the left and right OH projectors would be at slight angles, but in theroy, it would produce an image, right?
moox. for a new generation.
When I was a kid, the whole world was colour but monaural. Then, when I was about 12, I started fooling around with my parents' audio equipment. From then on, I could hear my whole world in glorious stereophonic sound! Man, those mono years sucked by comparison. I took piano lessons when I was a kid. I wonder what they would have sounded like in stereo?
Anyway, I took a class on photography in high school and did a presentation on colour photo printing. During my research, I saw a lot of early attempts at colour photography using black-and-white film. None were as clear as the pictures on that site, tho. Most didn't have the red, green, and blue colour plates quite lined up correctly causing red, green, and blue flaring at the edges of objects.
In fact, on closer inspection, some of Prokudin-Gorskii's pictures look like they were done by snapping three pictures in quick succession with the different filters. Take a look at the water in this one, which was probably not calm at the time. Also, look at the little guy on the far left in this picture. I guess he couldn't sit still!
Still, this photographer was really clever! Now if I can just figure out how to record stereophonic sound on a monaural tape recorder...
Yes, this is a fairly stupid comment, but it does make some sense. Since the only photographical records we have of the past are in black and white, it is difficult to imagine anything before the ~1960's in color. If you showed some of his pictures from ~WW1 to the average person, and told them they were from 1915, they wouldn't believe you.
I wonder if sometime, 50 years from now, we'll look at 2-dimensional still images as a thing of the past, having 3d holographic displays. Interesting to think about.
no it's not, Founder is from US, hosted in US, US domain name, majority of readers, US.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Space buffs amongst you will note that NASA's Voyager used a B&W CCD with three colour filters. The three images would be beamed back to earth and recombined with a supercomputer. A clever way to beat limits of CCD and communications technology in the day.
--
"Don't declare a revolution unless you are prepared to be guillotined." - Anon.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
It is nice to come across something actually interesting on a Sunday. This is much like how projection tv's work. BTW... I read about some sort of filtering software that scans emails and etc. for images containing a lot of flesh tones. To get around that, try dropping a color several notches, and change the filename... for example, notpornR-50.jpg. The end viewer can adjust the red, in this case, up 50, and get a pretty picture. Or... color-based news groups... for example... alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.red.midgets alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.blue.midgets alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.green.midgets Build a script to split out the 3 versions and crosspost appropriately, another to retrieve and combine them. Moral: Every new technology trick is immediately analized for its porn value.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
You didn't read the article!
A little modern "digichromatography" ... reapplication of the filtered colours and combining them into a composite colour image... allows for stunning full colour reproductions!
Just like the Calvin & Hobbes comic, these images became color way after the entire world did sometime in the 1950s.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I experienced exactly the same thing. It was just very strange to see people 100 years ago living in a world that looked just like ours, except for some funny clothes, lots of wood, and poor building codes. I could imagine actually being there, and after some minor color adjustments in Photoshop, it was just like looking through a window. People back then weren't shadowy or grainy, and they lived life much as we would if we had less technology and education. Amazing!
Some of these images contain elements that moved through the picture between different shots being taken with different filters. You can see this clearly in photoshop. For example, in this image, if you turn OFF different combinations of R,G and B channels in photoshop (and probably GIMP too), you can see a man in the background appear and disappear. In the composite photo, he appears to be glowing with red and blue halos. In the individual channels, sometimes he is there, and sometimes he is not!
I used to be facinated by old photographic processes. I believe that using filters to make b+w shots that will later be recombined has been around for a long time. While RGB color theory has been around for only a century or so, artists have know for many hundreds of years that you can combine several printing plates, one for each color you want, and print them one on top of another. Many of the early photograhic processes like the gum-dichoromate types allowed printing in various colors using actual artist pigments fairly easy.
What really amazed me was the orignal Technicolor technique. Orignally Technicolor used a special camera that held three reels of film running at the same time. Look here for a picture of one of these cameras http://www.technicolor.com/aboutus/his1930.html. Each reel recorded for one primary color. They must have used some sort of clever prism followed by filters. These three film reels would be processed, and then used to make film that would absorb dye depending on the amount of exposure that had occured. One reel is dyed for each of the primaries. The dye is then transferred by physical contact to one reel of film combining the colors. Imagine trying to keep everything in register. Think of all this the next time you watch Gone With The Wind! I believe Technicolor still uses some aspects of the orginal technique. Kodak still has dye-transfer materials for making what amounts to photos on paper using three black and white negatives. A neat thing about the dye-transfer process is that you end up with a photo done in dyes that are very nice looking and fairly stable. Another payoff to doing things this way was the control you could get by adusting the dyes for each color. Amazingly, there was a time before Photoshop, when they still managed to make excellent photos!
The computer, the radio and canned food as we know it today came from many inovations made on both sides of the Atlantic. I am not sure why you HATE Amercians so much. Maybe you should seak profesional help? Also, we are all not descended from Europeans. The Native americans are descended from asians who came acrossed the Berring Straight during the last ice age.
heh- ya right dude, check out the library of congress photos of his. There's three B&W photos for every color one. get real, do some research...
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
So I guess the world really WAS in color back then. All my thoughts about how the world used to be--- DESTROYED!!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
You'd think you've guys never heard of thing called a "Crayon"...
With these magical wax based tools I can "colorize" any black and white shot... been doing so since the spirit of '76 =P
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
In the self-portrait by the river, the water, unlike everything else in the picture, seems... blurry, oily, I can't quite get it, but it doesn't look like a normal river. This might be evidence of three pictures taken in quick sucession from the same spot.
I imagine them switching cameras somehat like modern Formula 1/CART/Indy pitcrews change tyres. Have to be quick so the scenery changes the least.
Damn, it wasn't like that at all. He had a three-eyed camera. Should've browsed the entire site first.
The technicolor 3-strip camera used this method. This camera was used for such films as "Gone With the Wind" and "Wizard of Oz". I uploaded a photo of the camera and a photo of it's description.
Technicolour files are taken using 3 BW images and 3 emulsions are laid onto the film to produce a colour image. new films use kodak? colour this takes a single colour image, you kan easly tell the differnace between the two technicolour produces a far more vivid image with better colours lower grain and far superiour chroma.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'm sorry I couldn't help replying, even though the origonal poster was obviously a troll.
And the Europeans (from whom you are all descended BTW) invented radio, television, electricity, the computer, canned food, the hot air balloon, penicillin, the railroad, the automobile, even those beloved GUNS that you are so enamoured with.
Now I don't know about the television, or the railroad. However electricity was always around. Modern use of ac electricity however was developed, and many of the devices invented by Tesla, an american citizen. Same with Radio. The myth that Marconi inventied it has been disproved many times over. Those are american inventions.
For the hot air balloon, try asia, they might not have had people in the balloons, but they had it first. Again with guns, first in asia, they gave them up as worthless and little better than toys. Europeans simply went farther with idea.
Canned food, try England (I think), they generally don't consider themselves part of the continent.
As for the computer, which definiton of computer? Depending on the definition, its either England, America, America, Germany, Germany or France. There have been some great slashdot articles on the subject, so do your reading.
One last thing, for the space race, the funding came from the US and the USSR, but +80% of the engineers were German born bred and educated, but rescued/kidnapped after WWII. I hardly think either the USSR or the US can take full credit for the first man in space for that reason.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
True, but remember, Henry Ford only invented the assembly line for autos. Assembly line production was previously used in many places, the earliest I can recall (so there are probably earlier) was a 19th century tackle factory in England.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Nearly a hundred years later you can give me the most advanced camera money can buy and I still wouldnt be able to produce photos as beautiful as these.
no sig.
Shit, the large versions of those pictures look better than what I'm capable of taking now.
The was steroscope cameras back then two that gave you 3D images by taking two photographs with lens set 4 inches a part.
The tri-color lens camera is also how early color TV was "filmed". Image came in the main lens and seperated in to RGB channels via prizmes with 3 Monocrome tubes read the images. Signal processing recombined the single for broadcast, the TV on the other end breaks it back up to RGB and using 3 guns in one tube displays it to you (if you still are using a tube... look real real close to see the dots!).
It was the seventies when that was moved down to 2 tubes. Red and Cyan. That was when the first "true" mobile cameras were available. Those cameras wrapped the cameraman's shoulder with the Red tube over the shoulder with Cyan tube pointing up the chest.
This would have been BIG NEWS if it was from one plate and not three. Then the KODAK plug would be "KODAK losses IP rights, Earlier ART Found!"
The site explains that there was some retouching to account for defects in the original image and deterioration of the original plates. Photographers have been doing that one way or another for as long as we've had cameras, so it's a little late to decide that it's "fake" now. Restoring and conserving old documents and photos is what the LOC is all about; I doubt that they would have knowingly gone off the deep end in presenting these pictures just to make them all pretty.
Also remember that these photos were originally created for projection, not for print. That whole process would have introduced anomalies of its own, especially since the light sources and filters used would probably not be "pure" in color. It may well be that the images on the web site are actually truer to life than it was possible to attain when the images were originally shown.
-Bryan
for that thought invoking last comment...
I thought the whole world was black and white in the past!
What's the implication here? growing up in such a media rich environment (I am only 19), I have been disensitized to such things as color. It's a given. Few things truly impress me. And if they do impress me, they become commonplace in a matter of minutes. "Wow that's amazing! Huh...I'm bored."
Yes, this is a common theme often brought up. But it begs the question, "Is it really all that hard to consider the past in color?" We've all seen...Wild Wild West. (first thing to come into my head...sorry..)
I suppose something else I considered was "Huh..this is amazing...except I could go to some random country in the eastern hemisphere and take pictures now that look like this." I was impressed and then I thought "This could all be replicated"
We are truly spoiled people. In the true sense of the word.
Did he file a patent on this? I'm sure some family member can make tons of money of all the Projection systems and color film out there. Patent lawyers do your thing! lol...
It's clear that he took each picture one after another and that it took him a few minutes (or less if it was a windy day up in the clouds). If you look at this picture: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-6500 .jpg
you'll see the color in the clouds are off, the red is a little to the right, the green to the left. So all he did was take a picture with one filter, replace the "film" he used, put another filter, etc. Also, the people in the pictures must have stood very still. Not a real difference from the old old days though.
Maxwell invented information theory? Hello, what about Claude Shannon? Are you suggesting "father of information theory" (Haykin 2000) was a plagiarist?
Maxwells treatment of speed governors can only be considered a founding paper on cybernetics in retrospect. He didn't have any concept of applying his physics to control of complex systems. Suggesting that Maxwell is a founder of cybernetics is as bold of a statement as saying that Descartes developed calculus because he could differentiate functions.
relying on my memory. Rats, My Bad.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Single plate color didn't show up until 1905 or so. See Autochrome. Also, Technicolor movie film operated this way, as did dye-transfer prints (still the best color print process, IF you can find someone to make them...)
What is really interesting though is that these negatives lack the standard registration marking of most such processes. Without these markings, it is very difficult to produce a reasonable image. Also, emulsion creep makes recovery from older images even more difficult. Using the computer to key off of the image points themselves rather than a series of markings on the substrate allows such old images to be restored with reasonable accuracy. And I bet it beats playing with registration pins and a squegee any old day.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
What suprises me most is not just seeing this world of the past in color, but seeing such BRIGHT colors. I always imagined everything from that era being dull and grey..
There is another small error here. Early photographic emulsions were orthochromatic, meaning that they were only sensitive to colors having a higher energy that red. Blue was one of the first colors easily recorded. The history of photographic spectral sensitivity has been a slow progression from the high-energy colors (blue, green) to the low (red, infrared).
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
An interesting side effect of using three frames of black-and-white film is that the colors will not drift over time. I was amazed how clear the colors are - chrome color film shot in the 60's looks far worse by comparison.
--Brandon
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
The physicist Maxwell developed a similar process, but he didn't dedicate a lot of time to using it. I bought Prokudin-Gorskii's book back in the 80's when I was a grad student in Russian studies. His achievements were truly remarkable. It is our good luck that Tsar Nichols II commissioned the photographer to chronicle scenes from around the Russian Empire.
As for Kodachrome, we shouldn't forget that the first process was developed by two classical musicians who dabbled in chemistry on the side. Much of their pioneering work was done in a closet. They were well on their way when Kodak heard about them and gave them a laboratory to work in.
He missed doing 3-D photographs by thaaat much. It appears that he had his three cameras one atop another; if they would have been side by side instead, he would have made the world's first 3-D pictures that make use of the red/green glasses.
Usually photos of that era and later show something as ubiquitous as trees: Telephone poles with wires strung up everywhere, but they were noticeably absent in these pictures. But then again, this was pre-WWI Russia, where technology was basically unheard of. I was amazed at the pristineness of everything, no web of telephone and power lines, no automobiles, Model T or otherwise, no smog from stacks belching smoke from factories and other coal burning behemoths, there wasn't even a scrap of litter. But I did see some evidence of technology, at least they had electric lights in some buildings, and I did see the turbines- they look more like generators or large motors, in fact, they look very much like the motors that drive the turbines in the pumping stations in New Orleans, some of which are over 100 years old and still in use.
I just gotta say his Ro><0rs.
I remember learning about a technique that cleaned up images by taking a laser model of the lens it was shot through and then applying the negative of it as a filter on the image (digitally ofcourse).
I always thought it would be cool if they did the same thing to old photos, but ofcourse you would have needed someone to have the intelligence (and foresigth) to use the color filters.
Now to actually find out that someone was thinking ahead is awsome.
One of the most lossy parts of his photography had
to be getting the filters just right. That is at the time what was the state of color-polarizing lenses? Sligh imperfections could cause color loss
between the lenses. If you project it back though
with the same lenses that you photograph with, you
should be fairly good.<BR><BR>
One of the ways that I was thinking that you could
do something like this was by using a prism. The prism is located directly behind the main lense, which would split the light into colors. This could be mathematicly calculated, and three other lenses could grab ranges of the prism, and redirect them correctly onto three seperate plates. Now using trig, and refraction you could probably caclulate exactly where to place the redirecting lenses, and the photo-plates.<BR><br>
Anyone interested in calculating the size of the camera for this method from the size of the photo plates?<BR><br>
Of course projecting them becomes a little harder, but you could light the plate, send it through a prism, and then redirect each color component through it's own lense. Looking at the projector would easily prove that he didn't use the system.<BR><br>
He would also have had the problem of synchornizing all threee shutters for each plane, but it would be an interesting science project for someone to try.
I reassembled the photos myself, and while this is some truely amazing photography (as well as the underlying techology) the images were touched up to hell and back
if anyone wants me to, i'll put the images online somewhere for you all to see what they truely look like
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
In fact, the color saturation reminds me of my digital camara, which may be an artifact of the camera used to digitize the original plates.
Or maybe they just applied too much S in Photoshop.
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
And of course much of the colour correction can be made with the projectors as well, varying light intensity and so on. I'd like to see how the pictures looked like in the original three-gun projector, though.
I do have a Russian camera myself, although it's 'much' newer: 1963... Very fun to use!
I am just glad that someone was able to document so much of the great architecture of old Russia in such beautiful color. During the revolution many of these buildings were destroyed. I have seen some incredible photos of some, but they were all black and white. It just doesn't do these buildings justice. Several of those buildings were painted with such incredible colors and it would be a shame to lose this record. It is amazing some of these churches survived the Soviets.
My name fits again.
Every single one of these pictures has been manually "tweaked" for optimal contrast and color balance, according to the page. In fact, it says that different regions of the same image are tweaked differently. Basically, someone brightened and sharpened in Photoshop, making the colors hyperrealistic and more pleasing to the eye. But what you see is not necessarily the natural or original colors that were photographed.
Because the site does not show the un-retouched composite images, we cannot judge the success of his RGB photography and we cannot come to our own conclusions on what the photographed scenes truly looked like.
...they're way ahead of their times. On the other hand, many acclaimed mainstream experts are actually total nuts and get away with it. Go figure.
This is due to exposure time.
Some modern photographers do something similar to give the effect of mist rolling down a river (which isn't really misty but is a raging white water river).
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M0571y H@rml355.
> digicromatography
That's just a fancy word that's slightly shorter than "scanneditinandplayedwithitinphotoshop".
I did like his 3-lense projection system though. Color photography and viewing before there was color film...
I wonder where his "special" photos of his wife went...
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Around the time Dorothy touched down in Oz.
Here you can find more pictures;
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/
Well, maybe if other nations would show more respect by kindly not calling us Yanks they would be better respected by us.
Also, a less patronizing tone would serve the purposes of your post better. The way it's written it looks like you are just trying to be a pompous arrogant 'my country is more refined than yours' prick. If you toned it down some maybe you could get across the message that we shouldn't have such a US-centric outlook. Otherwise, it's just a troll.
As a sidenote, electricity was discovered not invented. If you really were a 'Lord' you should probably know that. But I don't remember if a good education was required with lordship. To be honest I really have no idea how those silly hereditary titles work.
It really is true...you don't realize how much your "mental image" of past times and places is influenced by the medium in which you see them. It's astonishing to look at those photographs and think that they were taken more than sixty years before I was born, when I've never seen anything but "black and white" or sepia photos from that time before. It's so strange to think that almost all of the people in those photos have been dead for so many years, but those pictures look like they were taken just yesterday. It makes you realize that the people back then were just as "real" as we are today. Very cool stuff! ;)
DennyK
Good point. Had he unveiled color photography in America, he'd have been burned at the stake as a witch.
That's a very nice trick. It would be real interesting if there were other photographers using filters as well. I believe that's how they store color movies, the master copies are acutally B&W with a separate copy for each color. They may not do that with modern films and who knows where digital cameras will take us.
I find this most fascinating from a psychological standpoint. As I look at these pictures and consider their age, I am unable to conceive of the concept of looking on a scene from this time period in full colour. All my life, I've seen the world of these years in black and white. To see them in colour is to deconstruct a piece of the allure that surrounds them. As Marshall Mcluhan would argue, the medium here, is, indeed, the message. To change the medium is to completely change the way I have been taught to view the period. The black and white medium alienates me from the people the past, providing me, through its imperfection, a way to differentiate present reality from past reality. By removing this alienating force, I find myself able to identify with the time in which these photos were taken in a way that is so new and different that I find it disturbing. The power of images in creating a "global village" is something that Mcluhan talked about at length. Perhaps these images of the past help bridge differences between past and present in the same way that TV images help bridge differences between western and eastern hemisphere.
I know exactly what you mean. My personal favourite is the old floodgate supervisor identified as being 84 years old in 1909. This is a great color photo of a man who was born when the American Revolution was still in the realm of living memory. It's the kind of thing that gives me a real sense of the continuity of history. These photos are some of the coolest things I've seen on the net in ages.
I've always wondered what a color photo of a pre-industrial-age sky would look like.
Just a thought.
I think it's a case of both.
Imagine trying to get three different shutters to open and close at the exact same moment in time. Neigh on impossible.
The site also shows a projector, which is focused properly, could possibly remove most of the distortion by 'reversing' the perspective as it was projected.
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
All these images are cool, the effect of the image slightly changing between frames
add some nice effects, like the water and the forest.
The forest one is scary, almost like there are Predators in there =:0
WHO do you credit the invention of the Radio to?
What kind of question is that?
Everybody knows that the late great (all hail) Nikola Tesla invented radio.
BTW I'm Oztaylian not American
The water is oily due to the exposure time. Even today, with our fast films, if you take a photo of fast flowing water, at anything bar the fastest exposure speeds, you get this 'blurry' or 'oily' look to running water due to it moving during the time the shutter is open.
He used 3 projectors to display his photos in color. The digicromatography is simply what they did to recreate the effect.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
There have been numerous attempts at reproducing color with b/w emulsions. This is one of them. Several others used patterned filters, not unlike the color filters found in today's CCD cameras. All of them were difficult to reproduce and required precise alignment. That's why, ultimately, color emulsions won out.
I'm just crushed by these pictures. I feel like a corner piece in the jigsaw puzzle in my understanding of human history is found. I look at the pictures, and the strong messages they convey such as the disparity of wealth and what humans are and capable of. I see many of the pictures, and would argue that they're better in black and white(the lone church for example), yet having them in color is a necessity. Someone mentions paintings, but paintings only show what an individual feels about a schene. By knowing the schene, you not only see what it is in concrete detail, but you also get to look back and peer into the painter's mind. Its really something, but I'm probably just overly fascinated by old photographs and overanalyze them too much.
God spoke to me
Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek actually developed a product called DigiView to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.
:-)
Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!!
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a LIVE channel.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is inseparable from pr0n."
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
What a trip. I'm impressed that our government spent money wisely. I'm all for this kind of stuff. Truly, truly impressive.
Things sure have changed.
Anarchists never rule
Oh LORD! If only. So happy to have seen that page, I can now die in peace.
I am confused here... Just WHO do you credit the invention of the Radio to? We are in awe of Europeans, but our awe is over-shadowed by the Asians and their advances which the Europeans stole.....see a pattern?
This method of RGB filtering and in-camera color separation was invented by James Clerk Maxwell, 2 years before this russian guy was born. Check it out for yourself at:
http://www.f32.com/articles/article.asp?artID=128
Maxwell also invented a few other minor things related to mathematics, like Information Theory.
Of course, there's a footnote that might explain the attribution somewhat:
This thread is exclusively dedicated to all Ted Turner cracks....
What exactly are you talking about? I don't see anyone surprised that it wasn't an American, and I'm sure that the reaction would have been the same if it was. So far, I think this Russian fellow did a fine job with these photos, and his trick was quite clever. I also think that you are an idiot.
We have this wonderful book called "Pictures for the Tsar" about Gorskii. It is out of print, unfortunately. I thought I had misplaced it, and after searching for the book for 5 years, it turned up at home again. If anyone is really interested in this stuff, I'd suggest looking for that book! Cheers, Mike