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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."
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.
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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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.
Everything was black and white back then. Its just that everything turned to color in the early 20th century. The color paintings you see? Well, a lot of great artists were insane, so were painting in color way back when.
It would appear that this guy's camera was quite insane as well.
(With all apologies to Calvin's dad)
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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.
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~
There are some interesting artifacts of the process. Look at the water in the second photo set. Or the top half of the pole.
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...
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.
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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.