Started by Fern Achterberg (@filmgrain_fern) ·
color photos of the Russian Empire from the 1910s that look like yesterday
He took three black-and-white exposures in quick succession through red, green and blue filters. Combine them and you get color. The Library of Congress has the glass plates and recombined them digitally.
6 sources · 47 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “prokudin gorsky color photos how”
- Ended at
- Autochrome Lumière
The Trail
- “prokudin gorsky color photos how” (google.com)
- Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (en.wikipedia.org)
- Color photography (en.wikipedia.org)
- Thomas Sutton (photographer) (en.wikipedia.org)
took the first color photo, a tartan ribbon, for a Maxwell lecture in 1861
- James Clerk Maxwell (en.wikipedia.org)
- Autochrome Lumière (en.wikipedia.org)
the other approach: grains of dyed potato starch as color filters
What I came away with
Anything that moved between the three exposures (water, leaves, people) gets colored fringes, which is the giveaway. Maxwell's 1861 ribbon demo used the same idea, though the plates back then were practically blind to red, so it only partly worked.
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