The Great War in Color
The Lumière brothers of France are best-known for their development of the first practical (by 19th century standards) motion-picture camera, but did you know they also developed a method of taking color still photos as early as the World War I era?
(more in the complete post)
Unlike Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, whose color photography of the same era involved taking three separate photos (with everyone sitting VERY still!) and then compositing them, the Lumières method involved dyed grains of potato starch scattered on the negative before it was exposed, allowing the picture to be captured in a single shot, although with a large amount of grain visible.
There are also a couple of other methods of color photography shown (none as effective as these two) on The Great War in Color. Enjoy!
posted by Lee H. @ Thursday, October 13, 2005
2 Comments:
Holy cow. I am absolutely fascinated by WWI. Well, not absolutely, but fascinated... but I do have a few Google searches running that feed me stories about WWI. I've been to Ypres to see the WWI battlefields twice. I did NOT know this! And these pictures are awesome!
That really is so cool. I like older technology like that. I always found the Prokudin-Gorskii method really interesting, but I could see hwere that probably wouldn't work so well with the whole thing of taking a photo of the war. I'm still not quite sure if I understand how the grains worked, but it's damned cool and they were brilliant to have thought of it. (Well, that and, you know, being the Lumiere Brothers...)
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