phsc.ca

Autotype of baby c 1900 courtesy of Felix Russo

Toronto. A Happy July 4th to our American friends! Here’s to a super year down south!

Colour photography is an interesting  topic. Those of us who form the smart phone brigade, are used to colour as a norm and black and white as a special feature for stills and videos. It wasn’t always so. From the beginnings of photography as we know it, in 1839 to mid last century, black and white was the norm.

How we see colour was postulated before photography, in 1802 by Thomas Young and refined by Hermann von Helmholtz. We call their theory today, the Young-Helmholtz theory. Their theory remained just that until it was validated by James Maxwell in 1861 with the help of photography. It was astounding that Maxwell’s demonstration even worked give the insensitivity of photographic media to certain colour bands back then.

With Maxwell’s pivotal experiment in hand, a young Frenchman named du Hauron proceeded to describe how just about any colour process would work. By the turn of the last century, the idea of tiny colour filters on a black and white glass negative evolved to the point where such concepts were marketable (eg, Autochrome by the Lumiere Brothers).

To improve speed and resolution, photographers resorted to exposing three black and white plates, each through a different filter. This approach was limited to still life, of course. To over come this barrier, cameras were concocted that exposed three plates simultaneously each through a different filter.

Regular cameras could shoot colour after the tri-pack film was created. Around 1935, Kodachrome became available and the quality resolution returned, but only if transparencies were made. Colour film was still abysmally slow. Mid last  century, colour negative film offered colour prints but initially resolution was poor. So poor that an embossed design was resorted to masking the resolution issue. Later last century print quality improved so much that colour became the norm.

Movies were a strong influence on colour with various tones and technicolor processes evolving. But even by mid last century colour was too expensive to be used for regular feature length movies. And today, we use super tiny filters over the pixels in our smart phones and digital cameras to create the illusion of colour. Autochrome anyone?