Color photography before it existed

koppie

It's called autochrome.  You take three black-and-white pictures, one with a red filter, one with a blue filter, and one with a green filter.  You use a slide projector to recombine the slides into a single color image.  The technique was invented in 1904, about 30 years before color film.  The result: color photographs you wouldn't expect.  Here are a few sites:

World War I in color: French troops wore a bright blue uniform.  Strikingly blue; it really jumps out of the scene.  Not what you're used to seeing in war movies where everything is washed out.

Czarist Russia: Two things are striking: (1) the buildings are spotless.  Either they painted them constantly, or they constantly cleaned the outside of their buildings.  By hand.  It's funny some of the things we neglect in an industrialized society (also I guess buildings get dirty faster now?); (2) the clothes are surprisingly bright and vivid.  Again, not what you see in historical movies, or even at historical reenactments.  They wore bolder colors than we do today.

Famous European Photographers Do Color: My mind keeps doing a double take with all these photographs.  The scenery looks natural, so do things like steam locomotives.  And then you stick in a person in a 19th-century outfit, only it's in color.  And it's not a painting, it's real.  It's hard to wrap your brain around what you're seeing.  Now try to imagine the entire world looking like that, because it did.

Here's the wikipedia article on autochrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome

The trippiest part: technology has come full circle.  Modern imaging still uses red-green-blue.  Want proof?  Look really closely at your computer screen.  Every pixel is made up of three sub-pixels: red, green, and blue.

Not only that, but modern space photography uses the very same technique: the Hubble takes three pictures with different filters, and the scientists recombine them into a single picture.  Sometimes they'll also mix in other wavelengths, like infrared or x-ray.  But it's essentially the same technique used by the Lumiere Brothers in Paris in 1904.

Trippy, huh?