WWI Colour photographs

Ian Grant

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Lumiere Autochromes are often beautiful images, and the colours are remarkable. It's worth trying to see some original prints. The company still exists although it's just the Sales & Marketing company for Ilford in France now.

Ian
 

Trask

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For those who like the technical aspects of early color photography AND for those who simply enjoy wonderful photographs, I highly recommend you view the Prokudin-Gorskii collection seen online at the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

This man was sent all over Russia by the Czar to photograph the country, and he used a special camera which recorded three separate images simultaneously, each with a different color filter. Making accurate prints from the resulting negatives was always very difficult because of registration problems, but the advent of digital images made the job much easier. It's stunning to see in color what we're used to seeing in black and white.
 

Aurum

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Mark Antony said:
For those of you in the UK you can see a fascinating story of how these images were shot. Most of them by Albert Kahn and his team.
a link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00dj1xn/
Mark
Click to expand...


BBC 4 have been running the series about Albert Kahn, on repeat for some time. Its worth watching if you get the chance. I'm not sure if it has been distributed on BBC world or similar into the US
 

Frank Szabo

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Mark:

This process seems to be similar to producing a color key or positives to burn plates for a 4 color printing operation.

The pictures of the "Ark"-looking boat and those in Russia were extremely interesting as , to my eyes anyway, they appear to have a similarity to Kodachrome color, more so than other processes I've seen and certainly better than Ektachrome. (BTW, what is a freakin' boat doing in a cow pasture?) While the three primaries are there, the black overlay is lacking - the fourth color of the separation. Something else for me to play with when I get time.

Perhaps Kodachrome will live forever, albeit in the electronics of a PC.
 
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Mark Antony

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The 'Ark' is a bait diggers base off the UK North Norfolk coast (Blakeney) the colours are quite accurate as this is at dawn and the grassy area was frozen (was taken last Christmas).
You could do this with CMYK as well if you need a black key layer, but RGB filers are easier to come by. here is the bait digger shot:

also a shot I accidentally posted in the gallery

I'm doing an autumn series soon....
 

Aurum

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I do like the effect, the picture of the boat especially looks at one glance like a normal colour photograph, and at the second slightly unreal, even though there is nothing to suggest otherwise (All the images are in perfect register)
You just can't quite put your finger on whats going on
 
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