Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Ben on May 21, 2012, 11:04:24 PM
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Interesting website, highlighting the photos of a Russian photographer, circa 1900. He took each photo in rapid succession in black and white using red, green, and blue filters. He then later combined the three photos into one color photograph. The images are pretty amazing.
http://imgur.com/a/cxMZT#0
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I recall seeing this some years ago. Just outstanding. =)
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Fascinating.
He did a good job superposing the filtered negatives. Notice that the only things that move show how the colors do not align, like the waves in the lake which naturally move, yet everything else is excellent.
My mother used to do professional photography and once demonstrated how to use filters and B&W film to obtain color photos. It's a neat trick.
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It's going to become even more relevant as color film gets more and more scarce. Kodak already discontinued ALL of their color transparency film.
From industry papers I have read, standard practice for Hollywood films is to strike 3 B&W separation negatives to store with the original camera negative. Reason being that color film has a lifetime of decades, but B&W on a polyester base has a lifetime of centuries, according to best estimates.
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Very cool
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I don't know about anyone else, but when I look at the photos, people especially, they look more "alive" and detailed than color images from the 60's and 70's, when color film was a photographic staple. I'm guessing that besides his obvious photographic skill, that some of this detail, especially faces, comes from the black and white film as a base?
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I doubt the aliveness you see is related to the 3-color technique. I would attribute it to the use of large-format plates. Larger formats have invisible grain structure, and the film itself is much thinner as a proportion of the image dimension, which tends to lend the 'aliveness' I think you are seeing. Large formats also encourage use of larger numeric apertures, especially with slow films, so you can often percieve that as more '3 dimensionality' in the image. You can see a similar quality in other large-format color images which are not 3-color separations, e.g. http://www.shorpy.com/node/1833 . This is a measly 4x5; the russian photographs are probably at least whole-plate size.
It's fairly rare to see large-format color images, because smaller formats were taking over by the time color film was becoming more widely used. By the '70s which you mention, the Nikon F and other Japanese 35mm SLRs were coming out and Kodachrome was in wide use for color photojournalism (National Geographic was a collossal consumer of 35mm Kodachrome). Medium formats like 6x6 were overtaking 4x5 speed graphics well before then, so the bulk of 'old' color photographs are on smaller formats. What's more, early color films were grainier than modern ones.
Of the modern photographers which shoot large formats (like me), I would venture that the great majority shoot black and white. Color film is about 5x as expensive as B&W and rapidly becoming impossible to print. Digital printing works for a lot of people, but if you have to finish on a computer anyway, film loses a big part of its appeal.
Also, remember that digitization did not become practical until the 90's and even now, nobody has incentive to digitize all old color film materials 'just in case', so the color images from the 70s that you see have typically been subject to 20-30 years of fading by the time they are digitized, while these B&W separations are basically unaffected by fading.
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It's going to become even more relevant as color film gets more and more scarce. Kodak already discontinued ALL of their color transparency film.
ALL of it?
I knew they dropped Kodachrome, but I thought they still offered Ektachrome.