When did color photographs appear in the world. Unique color photographs of the USSR

Despite the abundance of photographers, often self-made, few can tell in detail about the history of photographs. That is what we will do today. After reading the article, you will learn: what is a camera obscura, what material became the basis for the first photograph, and how instant photography appeared.

Where did it all begin?

People have known about the chemical properties of sunlight for a very long time. Even in ancient times, any person could say that the sun's rays make skin color darker, guessed about the effect of light on the taste of beer and the sparkling of precious stones. History has more than a thousand years of observations of the behavior of certain objects under the influence of ultraviolet radiation (this is the type of radiation characteristic of the sun).

The first analogue of photography began to be truly used as early as the 10th century AD.

This application consisted in the so-called camera obscura. It represents a completely dark room, one of the walls of which had a round hole that transmits light. Thanks to him, a projection of the image appeared on the opposite wall, which the artists of that time “finalized” and received beautiful drawings.

The image on the walls was upside down, but that didn't make it any less beautiful. This phenomenon was discovered by an Arab scientist from Basra named Alhazen. For a long time he was engaged in observing light rays, and the phenomenon of the camera obscura was first noticed by him on the darkened white wall of his tent. The scientist used it to observe the dimming of the sun: even then they understood that it was very dangerous to look at the sun directly.

First photo: background and successful attempts.

The main premise is the proof by Johann Heinrich Schulz in 1725 that it is light, and not heat, that causes silver salt to turn dark. He did this by accident: trying to create a luminous substance, he mixed chalk with nitric acid, and with a small amount of dissolved silver. He noticed that under the influence of sunlight the white solution darkens.

This prompted the scientist to another experiment: he tried to get an image of letters and numbers by cutting them out on paper and applying them to the illuminated side of the vessel. He received the image, but he did not even have thoughts about saving it. Based on the work of Schultz, the scientist Grotgus found that the absorption and emission of light occurs under the influence of temperature.

Later, in 1822, the world's first image was obtained, more or less familiar to modern man. It was received by Joseph Nsefort Niépce, but the frame he received was not preserved properly. Because of this, he continued to work with great zeal and received in 1826, a full-fledged frame, called "View from the Window". It was he who went down in history as the first full-fledged photograph, although it was still far from the quality we were used to.

The use of metals is a significant simplification of the process.

A few years later, in 1839, another Frenchman, Louis-Jacques Daguerre, published a new material for taking photographs: copper plates coated with silver. After that, the plate was doused with iodine vapor, which created a layer of light-sensitive silver iodide. It was he who was the key to future photography.

After processing, the layer was subjected to a 30-minute exposure in a room illuminated by sunlight. Then the plate was taken to a dark room and treated with mercury vapor, and the frame was fixed with table salt. It is Daguerre who is considered to be the creator of the first more or less high-quality photograph. This method, although it was far from "mere mortals", was already much simpler than the first.

Color photography is a breakthrough of its time.

Many people think that color photography appeared only with the creation of film cameras. This is not true at all. The year of creation of the first color photograph is considered to be 1861, it was then that James Maxwell received the image, later called the “Tartan Ribbon”. For creation, the method of three-color photography or the color separation method was used, whichever one likes more.

To obtain this frame, three cameras were used, each of which was equipped with a special filter that makes up the primary colors: red, green and blue. As a result, three images were obtained, which were combined into one, but such a process could not be called simple and fast. To simplify it, intensive research was carried out on photosensitive materials.

The first step towards simplification was the identification of sensitizers. They were discovered by Hermann Vogel, a scientist from Germany. After some time, he managed to get a layer sensitive to the green color spectrum. Later, his student Adolf Miethe created sensitizers sensitive to the three primary colors: red, green and blue. He demonstrated his discovery in 1902 at a Berlin scientific conference along with the first color projector.

One of the first photochemists in Russia, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, a student of Mitya, developed a sensitizer more sensitive to the red-orange spectrum, which allowed him to surpass his teacher. He also managed to reduce the shutter speed, managed to make the pictures more massive, that is, he created all the possibilities for replicating photographs. Based on the inventions of these scientists, special photographic plates were created, which, despite their shortcomings, were in high demand among ordinary consumers.

Snapshot is another step towards speeding up the process.

In general, the year of the appearance of this type of photography is considered to be 1923, when a patent for the creation of an “instant camera” was registered. There was little use for such a device, the combination of a camera and a photo lab was extremely cumbersome and did not greatly reduce the time it takes to get a frame. Understanding the problem came a little later. It consisted in the inconvenience of the process of obtaining the finished negative.

It was in the 1930s that complex light-sensitive elements first appeared, which made it possible to obtain a ready-made positive. Agfa was involved in their development in the first couple, and the guys from Polaroid were engaged in them en masse. The first cameras of the company made it possible to take instant photographs immediately after taking a picture.

A little later, similar ideas were tried to be implemented in the USSR. Photo sets "Moment", "Photon" were created here, but they did not find popularity. The main reason is the lack of unique light-sensitive films to obtain a positive. It was the principle laid down by these devices that became one of the key and most popular at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century, especially in Europe.

Digital photography is a leap forward in the development of the industry.

This type of photography really originated quite recently - in 1981. The founders can be safely considered the Japanese: Sony showed the first device in which the matrix replaced the film. Everyone knows how a digital camera differs from a film camera, right? Yes, it could not be called a high-quality digital camera in the modern sense, but the first step was obvious.

In the future, a similar concept was developed by many companies, but the first digital device, as we are used to seeing it, was created by Kodak. The serial production of the camera began in 1990, and it almost immediately became super popular.

In 1991, Kodak, together with Nikon, released the Kodak DSC100 professional digital SLR camera based on the Nikon F3 camera. This device weighed 5 kilograms.

It is worth noting that with the advent of digital technologies, the scope of photography has become more extensive.
Modern cameras, as a rule, are divided into several categories: professional, amateur and mobile. In general, they differ from each other only in the size of the matrix, optics and processing algorithms. Due to the small number of differences, the line between amateur and mobile cameras is gradually blurring.

Application of photography

Back in the middle of the last century, it was hard to imagine that clear images in newspapers and magazines would become a mandatory attribute. The boom in photography was especially pronounced with the advent of digital cameras. Yes, many will say that film cameras were better and more popular, but it was digital technology that made it possible to save the photographic industry from problems such as running out of film or overlaying frames on top of each other.

Moreover, modern photography is undergoing extremely interesting changes. If earlier, for example, to get a photo in your passport, you had to stand in a long queue, take a picture and wait a few more days before printing it, but now it’s enough just to take a picture of yourself on a white background with certain requirements on your phone and print the pictures on special paper.

Artistic photography has also come a long way. Previously, it was difficult to get a highly detailed frame of a mountain landscape, it was difficult to crop unnecessary elements or make high-quality photo processing. Now even mobile photographers are getting great shots, ready to compete with pocket digital cameras without any problems. Of course, smartphones cannot compete with full-fledged cameras, such as Canon 5D, but this is a topic for a separate discussion.

Digital SLR for beginners 2.0- for connoisseurs of Nikon.

My first MIRROR— for connoisseurs of CANON.

So, dear reader, now you know a little more about the history of photography. I hope this material will be useful to you. If so, why not subscribe to the blog update and tell your friends about it? Moreover, you will find a lot of interesting materials that will allow you to become more literate in matters of photography. Good luck and thank you for your attention.

Sincerely yours, Timur Mustaev.

There are many iconic photographs in history taken by a lucky chance. An amazing story of coincidences contributed to the appearance of the first color photograph. "Platform Ribbon" or "Tartan Ribbon" - a multi-colored image obtained by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell and photographer Thomas Sutton - blue, green and red - and demonstrated during a lecture on the topic of color vision at the London Royal Institute of Great Britain on May 17, 1861.

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Publishing house "Nauka"
Moscow, 1968

James Maxwell is known for his work in the field of electromagnetic theory, but the scientist was also interested in the theory of colors. In particular, he supported Thomas Young's idea of ​​three primary colors and their relationship to physiological processes in the human body. A joint experiment between Maxwell and inventor photographer Thomas Sutton was supposed to reinforce these assumptions.

Scientists successively photographed a knotted ribbon of Scottish fabric with a traditional checkered (tartan) ornament through multi-colored filters. Illuminating the negatives through the same filters, we managed to get a full-color projection of the image. As it was shown almost a hundred years later by the employees of the Kodak company, who recreated the conditions of Maxwell's experiment, the available photographic materials did not allow to demonstrate a color photograph and, in particular, to obtain red and green images.

R.M. Evans, who conducted this experiment, explained the appearance of colors in the Sutton-Maxwell photograph as follows: “It is clear that our film, like Sutton's, is sensitive only to extreme blue and ultraviolet. The fact that the images were obtained not only with blue but also with green and red filters indicates that all solutions transmit light with a wavelength shorter than 430 µm (micrometers). In other words, the only radiation that affected the emulsion was light at the extreme blue end of the visible spectrum and an even shorter invisible radiation in the ultraviolet. Our lens, which is very similar to the Sutton lens, was able to pass ultraviolet up to 325 µm. The wavelengths transmitted by the lens and the three solutions (diluted) are shown in the spectrographic curves.

It is immediately clear that the three filters quite clearly divide the blue and ultraviolet regions of the spectrum into three separate regions, although the green is contained within the blue. Quite by accident, it turned out that the filters chosen by Sutton to separate the visible spectrum act in a similar way in a relatively narrow section of light with a small wavelength. When looking at these curves, it should be remembered that with a green filter, the exposure was 120 times, and with green, 80 times more than with blue. When constructing the curves, these coefficients were not taken into account.

Now one can understand how blue was separated from other colors and how real green can be separated from blue. But at once it might seem that everything painted red is completely indistinguishable. It turns out that many paints reflect not only the light that we see as red, but also a lot of ultraviolet. Therefore, a red object can give a clear image on a "red" plate, not because it is red, but because it is more ultraviolet than those objects that we perceive as green and blue. We do not know, of course, in what red tones the ribbon photographed by Sutton was dyed. Moreover, there is no description of its color at all, which means we cannot be sure that the areas of the tape that Sutton turned out brighter on the red plate were really red, and not some other highly reflective color in the ultraviolet. It seems incredible, however, that Maxwell would show the photograph if the red spots were not in place. If so, they were created by ultraviolet - red coloring of the tape - a happy accident that neither Maxwell nor Sutton could have foreseen.

“View from the window on Le Grace” - the photo was already a real one.

The original image on the plate looks very specific:

digitization

Niépce photographed the view from the window of his own house, and the shutter speed lasted for eight hours! The roofs of the nearest buildings and a piece of the yard - that's what you can see in this photo.

It was a picture of a table set for a picnic - 1829.

The Niepce method was not suitable for photographic portraits.

But French artist he succeeded in this - his method conveyed halftones well, and a shorter exposure allowed taking pictures of living people. Louis Daguerre collaborated with Niepce, but it took him a few more years after Niepce's death to bring the invention to perfection.

The first Daguerreotype was made in 1837 and represented

snapshot of Daguerre's art workshop

Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple 1838

(The world's first photograph with a person).

Church at Holyrood, Edinburgh, 1834

1839 - the first photographic portraits of people, women and men appeared.

On the left is American Dorothy Katherine Draper, whose picture, taken by a scientist brother, became the first photographic portrait within the United States and the first photographic portrait of a woman with open eyes.

The exposure lasted 65 seconds, Dorothy's face had to be covered with a thick layer of white powder.

And on the right is the Dutch chemist Robert Cornelius, who contrived to photograph himself.

His photographic portrait taken in October 1839 is the very first photograph

in history in general. Both of these experimental portraits, in my opinion, look expressive and at ease, as opposed to later daguerreotypes, in which people often looked like idols due to excessive tension.

From the surviving daguerreotypes

The first erotic photograph taken by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in 1839.

An 1839 daguerreotype shows the Port of Ripetta in Italy. Pretty detailed image, however, in places the shadow ate everything into solid black.

And in this picture of Paris you can see the famous Louvre from the Seine River. All the same 1839. It's funny - many of the works of art exhibited in the Louvre and now considered ancient works of art had not yet been created at the time of the shooting.

Already in the first year of its existence, the daguerreotype preserved many traces of the past. The spread of the new technology was very intensive, surprisingly intensive for such an unusual novelty at that time. As early as 1839, people were already photographing things like museum collections, such as this collection of shells.

The next year came, 1840. Man has increasingly become a subject for photographs. This is the first photograph of a person in full growth (full-fledged, not a small, blurry silhouette). On it we can see with our own eyes an attribute of the life of the elite of the past, already at that time an old tradition - a personal carriage ready for a trip and a smart servant inviting passengers to take their seats. True, he does not invite us - we are a little late. Years for 170.

But in this photo of the same year - the family of the great Mozart. Although it has not been proven, there is a 90% chance that the elderly woman in the front row is Constance Mozart, the wife of the musician. Both this and the previous photographs allow us to at least get in touch with those times that already in 1840 were considered to be the deep past.

The idea immediately arises that daguerreotypes can convey to us some traces of an even older era - the 18th century. Who was the oldest of the people captured in the oldest photographs? Can we see the faces of people who lived most of their lives in the 18th century? Some people live up to 100 years and even more.

Daniel Waldo, born September 10, 1762, was related to US President John Adams. This man fought during the American Revolution, and in the photo we can see him at the age of 101 years.

Hugh Brady, illustrious American general, born July 29, 1768 - had the honor of fighting in the War of 1812.

And finally, one of the first white people born on the American continent - Konrad Heyer, who posed for a photographer back in 1852 at the age of 103! He served in the army under George Washington himself and participated in the Revolution. In the same eyes that we look into now, people from the era of the 17th century looked - from the 16xx!

1852 - the oldest person ever posed for a photographer by year of birth was photographed. Posed for a photographer at the age of 103!

Unlike Niepce, Louis Daguerre left a legacy to humanity and his own photographic portrait. Here he was such an imposing and handsome gentleman.

Moreover, thanks to his daguerreotype, a photograph of his competitor from England, William Henry Fox Talbot, has come down to us. 1844

Talbot invented a fundamentally different photography technology, much closer to the film cameras of the 20th century. He called it calotype - an unaesthetic name for a Russian-speaking person, but in Greek it means “beautiful imprint” (kalos-typos). You can use the name "talbotype". The common thing between calotypes and film cameras lies in the presence of an intermediate stage - a negative, due to which an unlimited number of photographs can be taken. Actually, the terms “positive”, “negative” and “photo” were coined by John Herschel under the impression of calotypes. Talbot's first successful experience dates back to 1835 - a picture of a window in the abbey in Lacock. Negative, positive and two modern photos for comparison.

In 1835, only the negative was made, Talbot finally figured out the production of positives only by 1839, presenting the calotype to the public almost simultaneously with the daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were better in quality, much clearer than calotypes, but due to the possibility of copying, calotype still occupied its niche. In addition, it cannot be unequivocally stated that Talbot's images are ugly. For example, the water on them is much more alive than on daguerreotypes. Here, for example, Lake Catherine in Scotland - a snapshot of 1844.

The 19th century has dawned. In the 1840s, photography becomes available to all more or less wealthy families. And we, after almost two centuries, can see how ordinary people of that time looked and dressed.

An 1846 family photo of the Adams couple with their daughter. You can often find this photograph mentioned as posthumous, based on the child's posture. In fact, the girl is just sleeping, she lived until the 1880s.

Daguerreotypes are indeed very detailed, it is convenient to study the fashion of bygone decades from them. Anna Minerva Rogers Macomb was taken in 1850.

Balloons were the first devices for people to fly. The picture shows the landing of one of these balls in 1850 on the Persian square (now the territory of Iran).

Photography became more and more popular, the newly-minted photographers took not only prim portraits with starched faces, but also very lively scenes of the world around them. 1852 Anthony Falls.

But this photo of 1853 is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. It was photographed by Charles Negret on the rooftops of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the painter Henry Le Sec posed for him. Both belonged to the first generation of photographers.

The conscience of Russian literature, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy - this is what he looked like in 1856. We will return to him later, and twice as much, because, despite the asceticism of this man and his closeness to ordinary people, advanced technologies were surprisingly persistently drawn to him, trying to capture his image.

There were new ways of taking pictures. Here is the 1856 ferrotype - a slightly blurry, but in its own way pleasant image, its soft halftones look more natural than the bold, clear contours of the daguerreotype.

Since photography appeared at the disposal of people, it means that at some time there must have been a desire to make changes to the resulting picture, combine two different images or distort them. 1858 is the year when the first photomontage was made. "Fading" - this is the name of this work, composed of five different negatives. It depicts a girl dying of tuberculosis. The composition is very emotional, however, I did not understand why there is a photomontage here. The same scene could have been done without him.

In the same year, the first aerial photograph was taken. To do this, it was necessary to attach a miniature camera to the legs of a tame bird. How helpless was the man then ...

Scene from the 60s… 1860s. Several people go on a trip on the only form of transport available in those years.

Baseball team "Brooklyn Excelsiors". Yes, America's favorite sport has a long history.

The first color photo - 1861.
Like most other experimental photographs, this image is not rich in content. A checkered ribbon from a Scottish outfit - that's the whole composition, with which the famous scientist James Clerk Maxwell decided to experiment. But she is colored. True, like the sound recordings of Leon Scott, experiments with color remained experiments, and it was necessary to wait a few more years before the regular receipt of color images from life.

By the way, the photo is the photographer himself.

They also tried to find a practical application for the photo. Guillaume Duchen, a French neurologist, used photography to present to the public his experiments on the nature of human facial expressions. By stimulating the facial muscles with electrodes, he achieved the reproduction of such expressions as joy or agony. His photo reports in 1862 became one of the first book photo illustrations that were not artistic, but scientific in nature.

Some of the old photographs look very unusual. Strong contrast and sharp outlines create the illusion that the lady is sitting in the middle of an entourage entirely carved from stone. 1860s.

In the 1860s, the real Japanese samurai were still in service. Not disguised actors, but samurai as they are. Soon after the photograph was taken, the samurai would be abolished as an estate.

Japanese ambassadors in Europe. 1860s. Fukuzawa Yukichi (second from left) acted as an English-Japanese translator.

Images of ordinary people have also been preserved, and not just representatives of high society. In the photo of the 1860s - a veteran of the American army with his wife.

As I mentioned, vintage photographs were often very clear and detailed. A fragment of a photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, taken in 1863 - close-up of his eyes. Taken as a whole, this photo seems to be an echo of something very far away, but when zoomed in, everything changes. A century and a half after the death of this man, his gaze still seems to me very alive and penetrating, as if I were standing in front of a living and healthy Lincoln.

A few more materials about the life of an outstanding person. Lincoln's first inauguration in 1861 - this photograph is strikingly different from most photographic materials of the 19th century. The cozy atmosphere of family shots in the midst of Victorian chambers and the monumentality of portraits of starched celebrities seem to be something long gone, while the seething crowd turns out to be much closer to the noisy everyday life of the 21st century.

Lincoln during the American Civil War, 1862. If you wish, you can find a lot of photographic materials about the war itself, filmed directly on the battlefield, in the barracks and during the transfer of troops.

Lincoln's second inauguration, 1864. The president himself can be seen in the center, holding a paper.

Civil War again - a tent serving as an Army local post office somewhere in Virginia, 1863.

Meanwhile, in England, everything is much calmer. 1864 Photographer Valentine Blancherd took a walk of the townsfolk along the King's Road in London.

Photo of the same year - actress Sarah Bernard posing for Paul Nadar. The look and style she chose for this photo is so neutral and timeless that a photo could be tagged 1980, 1990 or 2000 and almost no one could dispute that, as many photographers still shoot in black and white. .

The first color photograph - 1877.
But back to photography. It was time to shoot in color something more impressive than a piece of multi-colored rag. The Frenchman Ducos de Hauron tried to do this using the triple exposure method - that is, photographing the same scene three times through filters and combining different materials during development. He named his method heliochromia. This is what the town of Angouleme looked like in 1877:

The reproduction of colors in this picture is imperfect, for example, the blue color is almost completely absent. Many animals with dichromatic vision see the world in much the same way. Here is an option that I tried to make more realistic by adjusting the color balance.

And here is another option, perhaps the closest to how the photo looks without color correction. You can imagine that you are looking through a bright yellow glass, and then the effect of presence will be the strongest.

A lesser known photo by Oron. View of the city of Agen. In general, it looks rather strange - the color palette is completely different (bright blue), the date is also confusing - 1874, that is, this photograph claims to be older than the previous one, although it is the previous photograph that is considered the oldest surviving work of Oron. It is quite possible that only an imprint remained from the heliochromia of 1874, and the original is irretrievably lost.

Still life with a rooster - another Oron's heliochromia, made in 1879. It is difficult to judge what we see in this color photo - a shot of stuffed birds, or a photocopy of a hand-drawn picture. At least the color reproduction is impressive. And yet, it is not good enough to justify such a complex photographic process. Therefore, Oron's method did not become a mass method of color photography.

But black and white flourished. John Thompson was the kind of photographer who approached his work from an artistic point of view. He believed that smart and tidy intellectuals, prim members of royal families, stern generals and pompous politicians - this is not all that may be of interest to photography. There is another life. One of his most famous works, made in 1876 or 1877, is a photo of a tired beggar woman sitting in sadness by the porch. The work is called "Unfortunate - life on the streets of London."

Railways were the very first urban mode of transport, by 1887 they already had a fifty-year history. It was in this year that a photograph of the Minneapolis junction railway station was taken. As you can see, freight trains and the technogenic urban landscape are not very different from modern ones.

But the culture and ways of presenting it in those years were completely different. Radio and television, the Internet and multimedia libraries - all this will appear later, after many, many years. Until then, people, without leaving their homes, could only get verbal descriptions of the life, traditions and cultural objects of other countries from newspapers. The only way to get in touch with the culture of the whole world more deeply by seeing its artifacts with your own eyes is through travel and exhibitions, such as the World Exhibition, the grandest event of those times. Especially for the Exhibition, on the initiative of the Prince Consort of England, in the middle of the 19th century, the Crystal Palace was built - a structure made of metal and glass, huge even by the standards of modern shopping and entertainment centers. The exhibition ended, but the Crystal Palace remained, becoming a permanent place for the exposition of literally everything - from antiquities to the latest technical innovations. In the summer of 1888, in the huge concert hall of the Crystal Palace, the Handel Festival took place - a chic musical performance with the participation of hundreds of musicians and thousands of singers and singers. The collage of photographs shows the concert hall in various years of the Crystal Palace's existence up to its death in a conflagration in 1936.

Intercity passenger transportation 1889

Canals in Venice "Venetian Canal" (1894) by Alfred Stieglitz

A very lively shot... but something else was missing. What? Oh yes, colors. Color was still needed, and not as experiments, but as ....

Saint-Maxime, Lippmann_photo_view

eye.A person from birth receives a postulate: sunlight is white. Objects have color because they are colored. Some color features of light have been known for a long time, but aroused interest rather among painters, philosophers and children.

Camera for "three-color" shooting by E. Kozlovsky (1901):

At the origins of color

It is a common misconception that it was Newton who discovered that a sunbeam consists of a combination of seven colors, clearly demonstrating this in an experiment with a trihedral glass prism. This is not entirely true, since such a prism has long been a favorite toy of the children of that time, who loved to let out sunbeams and play with a rainbow in puddles. But in 1666, 23-year-old Isaac Newton, who had been interested in optics all his life, was the first to publicly declare that the difference in color is by no means an objective phenomenon of nature, and that “white” light itself is just a subjective perception of human eyes.

Trichromic camera, early 20th century. The three primary color filters create three negatives that, when added together, form a natural color:

Newton demonstrated that a sunbeam passed through a prism is decomposed into seven primary colors - from red to violet, but explained their difference from each other by the difference in the size of particles (corpuscles) that enter the human body. eye. He considered the red corpuscles to be the largest, and the violet ones to be the smallest. Newton also made another important discovery. He showed an effect that would later be called "Newton's color rings": if you illuminate a biconvex lens a beam of monochrome color, i.e. either red or blue, and project the image onto the screen, you get a picture of rings of two alternating colors. By the way, this discovery formed the basis of the theory of interference.

Projection light for tri-color photography:

A century and a half after Newton, another researcher, Herschel (it was he who suggested using sodium thiosulfate, which is indispensable to this day, to fix images) discovered that rays of sunlight, acting on silver halide *, make it possible to obtain images of a color almost identical to the color of the object being photographed, those. a color formed by mixing the seven primary colors. Herschel also discovered that, depending on which rays reflect a particular object, it is perceived by us as painted in one color or another. For example, a green apple appears green because it reflects the green rays of the spectrum and absorbs the rest. That's how it started color Photo. Unfortunately, Herschel failed to find a technology for stable fixing of the color obtained on halide silver - the colors quickly darkened in the light. In addition, halide silver is more sensitive to blue-blue rays and perceives yellow and red much weaker. So for "equal" transmission of the full spectrum, it was necessary to find a way to make photographic materials color sensitive.

In the middle of World War II, the Kodacolor method appeared, which was used to take a picture of the English Kittyhawk fighter in North Africa.
Color photography and black and white are almost the same age. The world was still amazed by the black and white image of the surrounding reality, and the pioneers of photography were already working on the creation of color photographs.

Some have taken the easy route and simply touched up black and white photographs by hand. The first "real" color photographs were taken as early as 1830. They did not differ in richness of shades, quickly faded, but still it was a color that concealed opportunities for a more natural transmission of the image. It wasn't until a century later that color photography became a powerful means of depiction and at the same time a wonderful mass entertainment.

The cornerstone of the photographic process is the properties of light. Back in 1725, Johann X. Schulze made an important discovery - he proved that silver nitrate mixed with chalk darkened under the influence of light, and not air or heat. Fifty-two years later, the Swedish chemist Carl W. Schiele came to the same conclusions while experimenting with silver chloride. This substance turned black when exposed to light rather than heat. But Schiele went further. He found that light in the violet part of the spectrum causes silver chloride to darken faster than light in other colors of the spectrum.

In 1826, Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce received the first, blurry, but stable image. These were the roofs of the houses and the chimneys visible from his office. The picture was taken on a sunny day and the exposure lasted eight hours. Niepce used a tin-based plate with a light-sensitive asphalt coating, and oils played the role of a fixer. Even before that, in 1810, the German physicist Johann T. Siebeck noticed that the colors of the spectrum could be captured in wet silver chloride, which had previously been darkened by exposure to white light. As it turned out later, the effect is explained by the interference of light waves, the nature of this phenomenon with the help of photographic emulsion was revealed by Gabriel Lipman. The pioneers of black-and-white photography, Niépce and Louis-Jacques Daguerre (who developed a process for making a sharp and highly visible image in 1839), aimed at creating stable color photographs, but they could not fix the resulting image. It was the business of the future.

In the "sluggish" image of a checkered ribbon, obtained in 1861 by James Clark Maxwell through color filters, the colors are reproduced quite accurately and this made a great impression on the audience.
First color images

The first attempts to obtain a color image by a direct method gave results in 1891, the physicist from the Sorbonne, Gabriel Lipman, achieved success. On Lipman's photographic plate, a grainless photographic emulsion was in contact with a layer of liquid mercury. When light fell on the photographic emulsion, it passed through it and was reflected from the mercury. The incoming light "collided" with the outgoing light, resulting in the formation of standing waves - a stable pattern in which bright places alternate with dark, the silver grains gave a similar pattern on the developed emulsion. The developed negative was placed on black material and viewed through a reflector. White light illuminated the negative, passed through the emulsion and was reflected in the pattern of silver grains on the emulsion, and the reflected light was colored in appropriate proportions. The processed plate gave accurate and bright colors, but they could only be seen standing directly in front of the plate.

Lipman surpassed his contemporaries in color accuracy, but excessive exposure times and other technical obstacles prevented his method from finding practical application. Lipman's work showed that scientists should also focus on indirect methods.

The Kromskop projector by Frederick Ivis was used to project images (a fruit basket) obtained by an apparatus that allowed all three negatives to be placed on one photographic plate. Light filters and mirrors of Kromskop combined partial positives into one combined image
This, of course, has been done before. As early as 1802, physicist Thomas Young developed the theory that eye contains three types of color receptors most actively responsive to red, blue and yellow, respectively. He concluded that the reaction to these colors in various proportions and combinations allows us to perceive the entire visible color spectrum. Young's ideas formed the basis of James Clark Maxwell's work in color photography.

In 1855, Maxwell proved that by mixing red, green and blue in various proportions, any other color can be obtained. He realized that this discovery would help develop a method for color photography, which requires revealing the colors of an object in a black-and-white image taken through red, green, and blue filters.

Six years later, Maxwell demonstrated his method (now known as the additive method) to a large audience of scientists in London. He showed how to get a color image of a piece of checkered tape. The photographer took three separate shots of the tape, one with a red filter, one with green, and one with blue. A black and white positive was made from each negative. Each positive was then projected onto a screen with a light of the appropriate color. The red, green, and blue images matched on the screen, resulting in a natural color image of the subject.

In those days, there was a photographic emulsion sensitive only to blue, violet and ultraviolet rays, and for scientists of subsequent generations, Maxwell's success remained a mystery. The green-sensitive plate was created by Hermann Vogel only in 1873, and panchromatic photographic plates sensitive to all colors of the spectrum did not appear on the market until 1906. However, it is now known that Maxwell was helped by two happy coincidences. The red colors of the tape reflected the ultraviolet light, which was fixed on the plate, and the green light filter partially missed the blue light.

For the creation of a photographic plate that transmits color due to the interference of light, Gabriel Lipman received the Nobel Prize. Parrot is one of his works
In the late 60s of the last century, two Frenchmen, working independently of each other, published their theories of the color process. They were Louis Ducos du Hauron, who worked furiously in the provinces, and Charles Cros, a lively and sociable Parisian, full of ideas. Each proposed a new method using dyes, which formed the basis of the subtractive color method. Du Hauron's ideas summarized a whole range of information about photography, including subtractive and additive methods. Many subsequent discoveries were based on du Hauron's suggestions. For example, he proposed a raster photographic plate, each layer of which was sensitive to one of the primary colors. However, the most promising solution was the use of dyes.

Like Maxwell, du Hauron produced three separate black-and-white negatives for the primary colors using color filters, but then he produced separate color positives that contained dyes in a gelatin coating. The colors of these dyes were complementary to the colors of the filters (for example, the positive from a negative with a red filter contained a blue-green dye that subtracted the red light). Next, it was necessary to combine these color images and illuminate them with white light, as a result, a color print was obtained on paper, and a color positive on glass. Each layer subtracted the corresponding amounts of red, green, or blue from the white light. Du Hauron received both prints and positives by this method. So in part he applied Maxwell's additive method, he developed it by seeing perspective in a subtractive color way. Further implementation of his ideas was, unfortunately, impossible at that time - the level of development of chemistry did not allow doing without three separate color positives and solving the problem of combination.

Many difficulties stood in the way of color photography enthusiasts. One of the main ones was the need to give three separate exposures through three different filters. This was a long and laborious process, especially when working with wet collodion photographic plates - an outdoor photographer must carry a portable darkroom with him. Since the 1970s, the situation has slightly improved, because pre-sensitized dry photographic plates appeared on the market. Another difficulty was the need to use a very long exposure, with a sudden change in lighting, weather or the position of the subject, the color balance of the final image was disturbed. With the advent of cameras capable of exposing three negatives at the same time, the situation has improved somewhat. For example, the camera invented by the American Frederick Ivis made it possible to place all three negatives on one plate, this happened in the 90s.

These butterflies were photographed in 1893 by John Joule using a raster photographic plate. To create a combined light filter, he applied microscopic and transparent stripes of red, green and blue to the glass, about 200 per inch (2.5 cm). In the apparatus, the filter was placed against the photographic plate, it filtered the exposed light and recorded its tonal values ​​on the photographic plate in black and white. Then a positive was made and combined with the same raster, as a result, the colors of the subject were recreated during projection
In 1888, George Eastman's $25 Kodak hand-held camera went on sale and immediately attracted the attention of American citizens. With his appearance, the search in the field of color photography began with renewed vigor. By this time, black-and-white photography had already become the property of the masses, and color reproduction still needed practical and theoretical development.

The only effective means of recreating color was the additive method. In 1893, Dubliner John Jouley invented a process similar to that previously described by du Auron. Instead of three negatives, he made one; instead of an image composed of three color positives, he projected one positive through a three-color light filter, resulting in a multi-color image. Up until the 1930s, raster photographic plates of one type or another made it possible to obtain an acceptable, and sometimes just a good color image.

From Autochrome to Polycolor

This photomicrograph shows how randomly scattered particles of starch are dyed in three primary colors and form a raster filter on a photographic plate developed by the Lumiere brothers in 1907.
The image obtained in 1893 by John Joule using a three-color filter was not very sharp, but soon the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the founders of public cinema, took the next step. In their factory in Lyon, the Lumiere brothers developed a new raster photographic plate, which in 1907 went on sale under the name Autochrome. To create their light filter, they covered one side of a glass plate with small round particles of transparent starch, haphazardly dyed in primary colors, and then pressed. They filled the gaps with carbon black, and applied a layer of varnish on top to create water resistance. By that time, a panchromatic emulsion had already appeared, and the Lumiere brothers applied a layer of it on the back of the plate. The principle was the same as that of Joules, but the Lumiere light filter did not consist of parallel lines, but of a dotted mosaic. Exposures in good light did not exceed one or two seconds, and the exposed plate was processed according to the inversion method, resulting in a color positive.

Subsequently, several more raster methods were invented, but their weakness was that the filters themselves absorbed about two-thirds of the light passing through them, and the images came out darkish. Sometimes particles of the same color appeared side by side on autochrome plates, and the image turned out to be spotty, however, in 1913 the Lumiere brothers produced 6,000 plates a day. Autochrome plates for the first time made it possible to obtain color images in a really simple way. They have been in high demand for 30 years.

The fragile colors of the portrait, taken by an unknown photographer around 1908, are quite characteristic of the Lumiere brothers' Autochrome method.
The additive method "Autochrome" brought color to the attention of the general public, and in Germany research was already underway in a completely different direction. In 1912, Rudolf Fischer discovered the existence of chemicals that react with the light-sensitive halides in the emulsion when film is developed, resulting in the formation of insoluble dyes. These color-forming chemicals - color components - can be introduced into the emulsion. When the film is developed, the dyes are restored, and with their help color images are created, which can then be combined. Du Hauron added dyes to partial positives, and Fischer showed that dyes could be created in the emulsion itself. Fischer's discovery brought scientists back to subtractive methods of color reproduction using dyes that absorb some of the main components of light, an approach that underpins the modern color process.

At that time, researchers used standard dyes, and experimented with films in several emulsion layers. In 1924 in the USA, old school comrades Leopold Manne and Leopold Godowsky patented a two-layer emulsion - one layer was sensitive to green and blue-green, the other to red. To make the image in color, they combined a double negative with a black and white positive and exposed them to dyes. But when the results of Fischer's work became known in the 1920s, they changed the direction of research and began studying the dye-forming components in three-layer emulsions.

However, the Americans found that they could not prevent the dyes from "crawling" from one emulsion layer to another, so they decided to put them in a developer. This tactic was successful, and in 1935 the first subtractive color film, Code-Chrome, appeared with three emulsion layers. It was intended for amateur cinema, but a year later there was a 35 mm film for the production of transparencies. Since the color components for these films were added at the development stage, the buyer had to send the finished film to the manufacturer for processing. Those who used 35mm film received back the transparencies in cardboard frames, ready for projection.

Advertising of the new color film of the Agfa company in 1936
In 1936, the Agfa company launched the Agfacolor 35 mm color positive film, which contained color components in the emulsion, which for the first time gave photographers the opportunity to process color films themselves. After another six years, the Kodacolor method was introduced in the United States, which made it possible to obtain rich and colorful prints. Based on the negative process, the Kodacolor method ushered in the era of instant color photography. Color printing has become extremely popular, but instant color photography has also developed rapidly.

A portrait taken with a Polaroid camera shows the accuracy and speed of color reproduction in instant photography, which was introduced in 1963.
Back in the late 1940s, Polaroid Corporation sold the first set to produce black and white photographs in 60 seconds, and by 1963 the upgrade needed to produce color photographs in a minute was completed. The owner of a Polaroid camera with Polyacolor film needs only to click the shutter, pull the tab and watch in amazement how the people or objects photographed by him appear in full color on a piece of white paper in one minute.