When was color photography invented? A Brief History of Color Photography. The development of photography in Russia

Nearly 200 years ago, the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce smeared a thin layer of asphalt on a metal plate and exposed it to the sun in a camera obscura. So he received the world's first "reflection of the visible." The picture turned out not of the best quality, but it is with him that the history of photography begins.

Even some 30-40 years ago, a significant part of photographs, films, television programs were black and white. Many do not realize that color photography appeared much earlier than we think. On May 17, 1861, the famous English physicist James Maxwell, during a lecture on the topic of color vision at the Royal Institution in London, showed the world's first color photograph - "Party Ribbon".

Since then, photography, in addition to turning from black and white into color, has received many more varieties: shooting from the air and from space, photomontage and x-rays, self-portrait, underwater photography and 3D photography have appeared.

1826 - the first and oldest photograph

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French photographer, took this picture using an eight-hour exposure. It's called "View from the window on Le Gras", last years on display at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

1838 - the first photograph of another person

Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of another person in 1838. The photograph of the Boulevard du Temple shows a busy street that appears to be deserted (exposure is 10 minutes, so no movement is visible), except for one person at the bottom left of the photograph (seen when enlarged).

1858 - first photomontage

In 1858, Henry Peach Robinson made the first photomontage by combining several negatives into one image.

The first and most famous combined photograph was called Fading Away - it consists of five negatives. The death of a girl from tuberculosis is depicted. The work caused a lot of controversy.

1861 - first color photograph

James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist, took the first color photograph in 1861. The photographic plates used in the process are now kept in Maxwell's birthplace (now a museum), 14 India Street, Edinburgh.

1875 - first self-portrait

The famous American photographer Matthew Brady was the first person to photograph himself, i.e. made a self-portrait.

Birds were the first aerial photographers. In 1903, Julius Neubronner combined a camera and a timer and attached it to a pigeon's neck. This invention was noted in the German army and used for military intelligence.

The first underwater color photograph was taken in the Gulf of Mexico by Dr. William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin in 1926.

On October 24, 1946, a 35mm camera mounted on a V-2 rocket took a picture from a height of 105 km above the Earth.

The first photograph to show a fully illuminated Earth is known as The Blue Marble. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft.

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 more interest 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, however, he 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. Niépce 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 colors 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 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 obtained 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. Exposure at good lighting 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 ended up on autochrome plates side by side, 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 really in a 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 during film development to form 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, the emulsion of which contained color components, 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.

Art photography or, as it was called at the dawn of its appearance, light painting is one of the youngest art forms. History artistic photography has almost two centuries, which is relatively small in the historical context. Nevertheless, in such a short period of time, the art of photography was able to turn from a complex skill, accessible only to a few, into one of the most massive trends, without which modern life is unthinkable.

First photographic experiences

I must say that the appearance of photography is closely connected with the discovery of optical and chemical effects, which eventually made it possible to make such an epoch-making discovery. The first of these was the creation of the so-called camera obscura - a primitive device capable of projecting an inverted image. In fact, it was a dark box with a small hole at one end, through which the rays of light, refracted, “draw” an image on the opposite wall. The invention of the camera obscura was especially liked by artists who placed a sheet of paper in the place where the image was projected and sketched it, covered with a dark cloth.

The effect of the camera obscura, I must say, was discovered completely by accident. Most likely, people simply noticed that the light falling from a thin crack or a round hole on a dark wall “shows” an inverted image of what is happening outside on it. As a matter of fact, the concept of “camera obscura” is translated from Latin precisely as “dark room”.

However, the very fact of the discovery of this optical effect, which was made in ancient times, did not, of course, mean the invention of photography. After all, it is not enough to project an image, it is also important to fix it on a certain medium.

And here it is worth recalling the discovery of the phenomenon of photosensitivity of a number of materials. And one of the inventors of this effect was our compatriot, a well-known political figure Count Alexei Petrovich Bestuzhev-Ryumin.

Being an amateur chemist, he noticed that solutions of iron salts change their original color when exposed to light. Around the same time, in 1725, a physicist from the University of Gaul, German Johann Heinrich Schulze, while trying to create substances that glow in the dark, discovered that a mixture of chalk and nitric acid with a small amount of dissolved silver darkens when light hits. In this case, the solution, which is in the dark, does not change its original characteristics at all.

After this observation, Schulze conducted several experiments where he placed various paper figures on a solution bottle. The result was a photographic imprint of the image, which disappeared after light hit the surface or when the solution was stirred. The researcher himself did not attach due importance to his experience, but after him many scientists continued to observe materials that had a photoelectric effect, which, in fact, led a century later to the invention of photography.

History of black and white photography

As many probably know, the first photograph was taken by the French experimenter Joseph Nicéphore Niepce back in 1822. Joseph from birth had aristocratic roots and came from a wealthy family. The father of the future "father of photography" served as an adviser to King Louis XV, and his mother was the daughter of a very wealthy lawyer. It goes without saying that in his youth, Joseph received an excellent education, studying at the most prestigious colleges in France.

Initially, the parents prepared their son for activities in the church sphere, but the young Niepce chose a different direction, becoming an officer in the revolutionary insurgent forces. During the hostilities, Joseph Niepce significantly deteriorated his health and resigned, after which he married the young beauty Agnes Ramer in 1795 and began to live in Nice, working as a full-time civil servant.

I must say that the young man was interested in physics and chemistry since childhood, and therefore, six years later, he returns to his hometown, where, together with his older brother Claude, he begins to work in the field of inventive activity. Since 1816, Niepce began to make attempts to find a way that would allow fixing on a physical medium the image that appears in the camera obscura.

Already the first experiments with silver salt, which changes color under the influence of sunlight, showed the main technical difficulty of creating the first photograph. Niepce managed to apply a negative image, but when removing the salt-coated plate from the camera obscura, it became clear that the image completely disappears. After these unsuccessful attempts, Joseph decided at all costs to fix the resulting image.

In his further experiments, Niepce decided to move away from the use of silver salt and pay attention to natural asphalt, which also changed its original properties under the influence of solar radiation. The downside of this solution was the extremely low light sensitivity of copper or limestone plates coated with this substance. These experiments were successful, and after etching the asphalt with acid, the image on the plate was preserved.

It is believed that Joseph Niépce made the first successful attempt to capture a photographic image in 1822, photographing a set table in his room. Unfortunately, the very first photo in the world has not survived to our time, and only the later picture “View from the Window” has survived, which is rightfully considered the most famous photograph in the world. It was made in 1826, and it took a long eight hours to exhibit it.

This shot, in its essence, was the first negative image, and at the same time it was in relief. The latter effect was achieved by etching the asphalt-coated plate. The advantage of the method was the ability to create a large number of similar images, but the disadvantage was obvious - such a long exposure made it suitable only for shooting static scenes, but was completely unsuitable even for portrait photography. Nevertheless, Niépce's experiments proved to the world that fixing an image in a camera obscura is possible and gave impetus to the research of other scientists who opened the world of traditional photography for us.

So, already in 1839, another researcher, Jacques Daguerre, announced a new method for obtaining a photographic image on a silver-plated copper or entirely silver plate. Daguerre's technology involved coating such a photographic plate with silver iodide, a photosensitive layer that formed on it when treated with iodine vapor. Daguerre managed to fix the image thanks to the use of mercury vapor and table salt.

The technology, later called daguerreotypes, turned out to be much more advanced than Niepce's method of obtaining a photographic image. In particular, the exposure of the plate required much less time (from 15 to 30 minutes), and the quality of the image was much higher. In addition, daguerreotype made it possible to obtain a positive image, which was also a significant advance in comparison with the negative image obtained by Niepce. For many decades, it was daguerreotype that was practically the only method of photography applicable in real life.

I must say that at the same time in England, William Henry Fox Talbot created another method for obtaining photographic images, which he called calotype. The light-sensitive element in Talbot's camera obscura was paper treated with silver chloride. The technology provided good image quality and was suitable for copying, unlike Dagger records. Exposure of the paper required exposure for one hour. In addition, in 1833 an artist named Hercule Florence also claimed his own method of obtaining a photographic image using silver nitrate. However, in those years this method did not receive distribution, but later a similar technique formed the basis for the creation of glass plates and films, which became the defining image carrier for photography for many decades.

By the way, the world owes the appearance of the term “photography” to astronomers John Herschel and Johann von Medler, who first introduced it into use in 1839.

History of color photography

As is known, Niepce's first photograph, as well as all subsequent images obtained, were exclusively monochrome or, as we used to say, black and white. However, few people know that already in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to obtain a color image. It was these experiments that gave impetus to the history of development in the world of color photography.

The first successfully created and fixed color photograph can be considered an image obtained in 1861 by explorer James Maxwell. True, the technology for obtaining such a photograph turned out to be extremely complicated: the image was taken by three cameras at once, on which three light filters (one for each) of red, green and blue colors were mounted. When projecting this image, it was possible to convey the colors of the surrounding reality. However, this technique is clearly not suitable for widespread use.

The discovery of sensitizers - substances that increase the sensitivity of silver compounds to light rays of various lengths - made it possible to bring color photography closer to practical implementation. For the first time, sensitizers were obtained by the photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, who developed a composition that was sensitive to the effects of waves in the green part of the light spectrum.

The discovery of this physical phenomenon made it possible to realize the practical implementation of color photography, the founder of which was Vogel's student Adolf Mitte. He created several types of sensitizers that made the photographic plate sensitive in the entire light spectrum, and developed the first version of a camera capable of generating a color image. Such a photograph could be printed using a polygraphic method and also demonstrated using a special projector with three beams of different colors.

It must be said that a huge role in the development of the Mitte technology and, most importantly, in its practical implementation belongs to the Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, who improved the method, created his own sensitizer and made several thousand color photographs of the most remote corners of the Russian Empire. The operation of the Prokudin-Gorsky camera was based on the principle of color separation, which today is the basis for the operation of any printing equipment, as well as digital camera matrices. However, the works of Prokudin-Gorsky are so interesting that we decided to consider the features of their creation in a separate ARTICLE.

I must say that color separation technology was far from the only one used to create color images. So, in 1907, the "fathers of cinema", the Lumiere brothers, presented their own method of obtaining a color image using special photographic plates, which they called "Autochrome". The Lumiere method had many drawbacks, being inferior in quality to Prokudin-Gorsky's technology and, in fact, to Mitte, but it was simpler and more accessible. At the same time, the colors themselves in the photo did not differ in high durability, the image was preserved exclusively on plates, and the frame itself turned out to be rather grainy. However, it was the Lumiere technology that turned out to be the most “tenacious”, having existed until 1935, when Kodak introduced a method for obtaining color photographs called Kodachrome. At the same time, Agfacolor technology was introduced three years earlier. The next important milestone in the development of color photography was the introduction of the "instant photo" system from Polaroid in 1963, and then the appearance of the first digital image capture technologies.

History of digital photography

Appearance digital photography largely due to the development of space programs and the "arms race" between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was then that the first techniques for capturing a digital image and transmitting it at a distance were developed. It goes without saying that the development of technology made it possible to bring it to the commercial market in the future.

It must be said that the first digital cameras used in spacecraft did not provide for the output of images to physical media. The same drawback was inherent in the first digital cameras introduced by Texas Instruments in 1972, as well as the first digital camera Mavica, which appeared a little later, and was developed by the Japanese company Sony. However, this shortcoming was eliminated quite quickly, and subsequent versions of Mavika could connect to a color printer to print images.

The undoubted success allowed Sony to be the first to launch commercial production of digital cameras in various versions with the common name Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). In fact, this camera was a video camera capable of operating in the "freeze frame" mode and capable of creating a photographic image with a dimension of 570x490 pixels, which was recorded by a sensor based on a CCD matrix. Later versions of the camera allowed you to immediately save the received photos to floppy disks, which could be immediately used on a PC.

I must say that it was the appearance of these cameras that made an unprecedented sensation. Judge for yourself - obtaining a photographic image did not require special knowledge, work with reagents, or the use of laboratories. The picture was obtained instantly and could be immediately viewed on the PC screen, which by that time were gaining more and more popularity. The downside of this approach was only the extremely low, in comparison with the film, the quality of the resulting "image".

A significant leap forward in the history of digital photography was its entry into the professional market segment. First of all, the advantages of digital photography became clear to reporters who needed to quickly transfer the result of the shooting to the publisher. At the same time, the quality of digital photography could suit most newspapers. It was for this target audience that Kodak introduced the first professional-class camera with the DCS 100 index in 1992, which was built on the basis of the popular Nikon F3 reportage “SLR” of those years. It should be said that the device, together with the storage disk, turned out to be very bulky (the camera, together with the external unit, weighed about five kilograms), and its cost approached the mark of 25 thousand dollars, despite the fact that the quality of the photographs was only sufficient for their newspaper printing. Despite this, reporters were quick to appreciate the benefits of fast transmission and image processing.

A couple of years later, the first models of cameras "for everyone" appeared on the market, including Apple's development - the QuickTake 100 digital camera. Its price of $ 749 indicated that the new technology could be quite affordable for the average consumer. After that, the rapid development of computer and network technologies contributed to the further refinement of the technology, which as a result led to the almost complete displacement of the film from most genres of photography, including the professional sphere. This became possible as a result of the advent of cameras with large size sensor, including 35 mm models, as well as medium format digital cameras based on high-quality matrices. As a result, the quality of digital photography has reached a qualitatively new level.

Even some 30-40 years ago, a significant part of photographs, films, TV shows were black and white. Many do not even realize that color photography appeared much earlier than it became widely accepted in life. This post is about the development of color photography.

In fact, attempts to obtain color photographs began to be made as early as the middle of the 19th century, shortly after. But the inventors faced many technical difficulties. In addition to just getting a color shot, there were big problems with getting the colors right. It is because of the various technical difficulties that the widespread introduction of color photography into life stretched over more than a hundred years. Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts, today we can see quite high-quality color photographs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tartan Ribbon - This photo is considered the world's first color photograph. It was shown by the famous English physicist James Maxwell during a lecture on the topic of color vision at the Royal Institution in London on May 17, 1861.

However, Maxwell was not seriously engaged in photography, and the Frenchman Louis Arthur Ducos du Auron became the pioneer of color photography. On November 23, 1868, he patented the first method for obtaining color photographs. The method was quite complicated and involved shooting the desired object three times through light filters, and the desired photograph was obtained after combining three plates of different colors.

Photographs by Louis Ducos du Auron (1870s)

In 1878, Louis Ducos du Hauron presented his collection of color photographs at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

In 1873, the German photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel made the discovery of sensitizers - substances that can increase the sensitivity of silver compounds to rays of different wavelengths. Then another German scientist, Adolf Mite, developed sensitizers that make the photographic plate sensitive to different parts of the spectrum. He also designed a camera for taking pictures in three colors and a three-beam projector for displaying the resulting color pictures. This equipment in action was first demonstrated by Adolf Miethe in Berlin in 1902.

Photographs by Adolf Mite (beginning of the 20th century)

The pioneer of color photography in Russia was Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, who improved the method of Adolf Mite and achieved very high quality color reproduction. At the beginning of the 20th century, he traveled Russian empire, taking many excellent color photographs (to date, about two thousand of them have survived).

Photographs by Prokudin-Gorsky (Russia, early 20th century)

Still, it was inconvenient to get one color image out of three, so that a color photograph would become mass, the method had to be simplified. This was done by the Lumiere brothers, the famous inventors of cinema. In 1907, they demonstrated their "Autochrome" method, which produced a color image on a glass plate.

Some of the "Autochromes" (beginning of the 20th century)

For the next 30 years, Autochrome became the go-to color photography method for the masses, until Kodak developed a more advanced method for color photography.

“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 painter 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. Spreading new technology it 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 man in full height(full, 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 Duchenne, 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.

Saved images and ordinary people and not just members 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. Fragment of a photo portrait of Abraham Lincoln, taken in 1863 - his eyes close-up. 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 desired, 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 the 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 Auron 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.

Less famous 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.