Amazing COLOR photos from 1909

[groovyone]

History As You've Never Seen It Before—In True Color - Albertkahn - Gizmodo

[zebulus]

Wow, that is really cool. Photos made from Potato Starch.

I love how brilliant the color is too! Really impressive.

[C!LLY]

OH WOW!! That is so interesting!!!

[janikphoto]

Those are great! I remember reading about the earliest color photographs in college, and the whole thing sounded fascinating. They had a camera that split the image into three with a prism, then three pieces of film were developed to capture the red, blue and green spectrums. The three colors were then combined into one full-color print. Very complex for a hundred years ago!

[KD5NRH]

Originally Posted by zebulus

Wow, that is really cool. Photos made from Potato Starch.

I love how brilliant the color is too! Really impressive.

I think the most impressive thing is that they were not only doing what amounts to selective color directly in the film process, but doing it better than most modern photographers can manage with Photoshop.

Looking at some of those, I wonder if they tailored the starch plates to emphasize specific colors, and picked a particular plate for the colors they wanted to bring out most in a particular scene.

[Imagebuffet]

As I recall from my Photography class, potato starch was used due to its fine grain structure. Three plates were each dyed a different color, to serve as a color filter, and the plate was exposed through the filter. This resulted in a gray image from each plate. Development reversed the process, from the gray image, through the filter, onto the print or display surface.

The article says that Albert Kahn went bankrupt in the Great Depression, after spending 22 years gathering these images. I am wondering how the images survived his bankruptcy? That might be useful, practical information for me to know in the near future.

[pcdeatherage]

the following from here...

Since 1986 the photographs have been collected into a museum at 14, Rue du Port, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, at the site of his garden. It is now a French national museum and includes four hectares of gardens, as well as the museum which houses his historic photographs and film.

still to think that they survived the Depression, WWII and the last 60 years of everything...