2010/8/25 Hauke Fath <hauke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > For those who have not seen it, yet, "Russia in color, a century ago": > > <http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html> > > And an interesting detail for our Zeiss Ikon heads, from a comment: > > <snip> > 669 Great pictures, many thanks! > My first serious camera in 1958 camera was a used 35mm 1932 Zeiss Contax > Model 1. A unique feature that made it unique was that its wind-up/film > advance knob pointed forward, parallel to the lens barrel, instead of > sitting on top of the camera. > It took me many years to understand the reason for that. One of the > numerous Contax 1 accesories available was a disk divided into three > sectors, each of which carried one of the color filters used for this > color system! > The disk was mounted on this knob, and each time the film was advanced > it rotated 1//3 of a turn - automatically placing one of the filters in > front of the lens. > This allowed to take the three required pictures in a relatively quick > sequence, minimizing differences between the three corresponding images. > This color system probably was not very popular in those days, and Zeiss > chose to move the knob to the top on its later Contax models 2 & 3 > beginning in 1936, which made the 3-filter disk unusable on them. > Posted by Bernard Wassertzug August 24, 2010 11:17 PM > </snip> Thanks for the URL Hauke, I had seen these images a few years ago but it's very good to see them again. The colors vividness is impressive, BTW it has to do with the corrections that the digital era makes possible, however the photographer Prokudin-Gorski also impressed his audience at the time, when the images were new; they were published in magazines, postcards and advertisements. The Tsar Nicholas II was also impressed by the images and gave to Prokudin-Gorski money and authorization to take color photographs about the life in the Russian Empire and these are the images we are enjoying now. The negs, glass plates and color prints were bought by the United States Library of Congress to Prokudin Gorski heirs in 1948, the collection has 1902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives. It was very difficult to obtain high quality images from these negs before the digital era, however a book with some of the images was published in 1980: "Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II" (London: Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 0283986786 ).The Library of Congress contracted the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into colour images in 2000, he used a technique called "digichromatography" to combine the red, green and blue negs to obtain the full color image; he needed around six to seven hours to align, clean and colour-correct each image. The same Library contracted the engineer Agüera y Arcas in 2004 to produce an automated colour composite of each of the 1902 negatives from the high-resolution digital images of the glass-plate negatives (made by Frankhauser), he applied algorithms to compensate the exposure differences, it made quicker the process. Prokudin-Gorski had an unique camera to take the photographs, there is no known replica or illustration about his camera, Dr. Adolf Miethe had a similar camera (probably) designed in 1906, Prokudin Gorski met him in Germany previously. Prokudin Gorski method was an ingenious photographic technique, the images were captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters; a single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera, he photographed the same scene three times in a rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter, he then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters. Problem for this method was that each image required several seconds to be taken and then some differences could appear between the three colours frames and the images could be projected or reproduced "out of register", without an exact coincidence between them (portraits specially), you can see a sample in the photograph about an old man in a river, the water has clear color fringing due to its movement. In spite of these drawbacks that he tried to avoid if possible, Prokudin Gorski color images were a success at the time, his colour portrait about the writer Leon Tolstoy became famous in the international intellectual circles. PG used 3x9 inches (about 8x23 cm) glass plates, an unique camera and a dedicated projector, I doubt you could obtain similar results using a small flexible negative like the 24x36mm, perhaps this is the reason the method had no interest for the Contax I users. an interesting link on the topic: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/making.html Carlos --- Rollei List - Post to rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - Subscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'subscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org - Unsubscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org - Online, searchable archives are available at //www.freelists.org/archives/rollei_list