Posted on Sunday 14 November 2004
Maxwell's technique was to capture an image three times, each time with
a different
colour filter over the lens (red, green and blue). The three images
were developed and then
projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped
with the same colour filter used to take its image. When brought into
register, the three images formed a full colour image. Unfortunately,
Maxwell's results were not very impressive. Photographic film in the
mid-nineteeth century was really only sensitive to ultra-violet light
so the filtering failed to have much of an effect. Prokudin-Gorskii,
however, was able to take full advantage of advances in film technology
that took place in the intervening time and was able to produce his colour photographs in strikingly vivid colour.
A few year ago, the Library of Congress had a selection of images from its collection digitally
reconstructed using a technique known as digichromatography
and placed them in an online exhibition. Better still, the library also placed its scanned collection
of plates online as well and since then there has been a veritable
cottage industry of restoring these images by various groups on the
internet. Longtime readers will know that I have blogged about Prokudin-Gorskii before (and again here) but I'm mentioning his work again because I only recently became aware of Alex Gridenko's excellent site.
Unlike many of these other reconstructions, these ones are of a particularly high quality
and he has chosen to work on subject matter from the collection that I
haven't seen displayed anywhere else.
