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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.
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.
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.