Many are familiar with the
history of the Leica and its influence on photography in general. The photographic process Leica relied on
essentially was no different from what we are using today. Many of the early Leica photographs are well
known. Quite a few were taken by Oskar
Barnack, the inventor of the Leica, himself.
Wetzlar Eisenmarkt
Photo: Oskar Barnack
All of these photographs are
in black and white, which brings up the question of color. Were there any color films in these early
days of 35mm photography? For an answer
we need to go back to virtually the beginning of photography in general.
The earliest permanent
photograph in existence was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, showing the roofs and chimneys visible
from his workroom. It required an
exposure time of eight hours on a bright, sunny day. He used a pewter plate with a light sensitive
varnish of asphalt (bitumen if Judea) and then used oils as a fixing agent. During the exposure, various areas of the
asphalt would harden to different degrees.
The oils washed away the less hardened areas of the asphalt, resulting
in a recognizable image. The word
snapshot doesn’t apply.
Joseph Nicéphore Niepce photograph from 1826
Niepce’s process proved to be
a dead end. Through the company of
Chevalier, the major manufacturer of lenses at the time, he met Louis-Jacques-Mandé
Daguerre. They formed a company to
research other means to take permanent photographs. Unfortunately, Niepce died before they had
any success. A nephew of his continues
to work with Daguerre, but when a viable process was developed, Daguerre took
the credit all for himself. This was the
famous Daguerreotype, first introduced in 1839 to the French Académie des
Sciences. While a lot faster than Niepce’s
first attempts, it still had the drawback of producing just a single picture at
the time. There were no negatives from
which multiple copies could be made.
"Boulevard du
Temple", taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known
candid photograph of a
person. The image shows a street, but because of the
over ten-minute exposure time the moving traffic does not
appear. At the lower
left, however, a man having his boots polished had both men motionless enough
for their images to be captured.
The first successful negative
process was developed by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1840. He used sensitized strips of paper, which,
when developed, allowed the contact printing of multiple images. Thus the photographic process closest to what
we use today, was born.
William Henry Fox Talbot, Laycock Abbey 1847
Virtually as soon as these processes
became available, the quest for color photographs started. The earliest color photographs were actually
hand colored daguerreotypes.
Simultaneously, a number individuals experimented with a variety of
processes to produce color images. Some
were met with limited success while others could not be repeated with any
certainty.
The three color process of
red-green-blue, RGB was first used by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861. His picture “Tartan
Ribbon” is generally considered the first durable color photograph, and the
very first made by the three-color method Maxwell first suggested in 1855.
Maxwell had the photographer Thomas Sutton photograph a tartan ribbon three
times, each time with a different color filter (red, green, and blue-violet)
over the lens. The three photographs were developed, printed on glass, and then
projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped with the
same color filter used to photograph it. When superimposed on the screen, the
three images formed a full-color image. Maxwell's three-color approach
underlies nearly all forms of color photography, whether film-based, analogue
video, or digital.
James Clerk Maxwell, "Tartan Ribbon" 1861
The credit for a valid color
process goes to John Joly. He was aware
that a color image could be formed by mixing just three colors, red, green and
blue, a process still used today in all types of color imaging. He used a glass plate which contained a
ruling of alternating RGB filters, about 200 per inch. This was placed against the glass negative
plate in the camera during exposure.
After developing, the same glass plate was put in register with the negative,
resulting in a color transparency which could even be projected.
John Joly "Butterflies" 1893
The process worked, but was
relatively cumbersome. Obviously, it
would be a lot easier to do away with the RGB plate and combine the RGB filters
with the emulsion. Such a process was
developed by the Lumière brothers. They
patented their Autochrome process in 1903 and began marketing it in 1907.
Just like Joly’s process, Autochrome
is an additive color process. The medium consists of a glass plate coated on
one side with a random mosaic of microscopic grains of potato starch dyed
red-orange, green, and blue-violet (an unusual but functional variant of the
standard RGB additive colors) which act as color filters. Carbon particles fill
the spaces between grains, and a black-and-white panchromatic silver halide
emulsion is coated on top of the filter layer.
The glass plates were loaded with the filter layer facing the lens. After developing, a color transparency was
the result. Autochrome was one of the
most widely used color photography process in use before the advent of
subtractive color film in the mid-1930s.
RGB colored starch particles function as a filter
Autochrome by the Lumiere brothers
Autochrome by Lumiere brothers
A similar process was
developed by Agfa in the 1920s. Instead
of the dyed starch particles, they developed a very fine RGB screen with also
was attached to the glass plate. It too
produced color transparencies. In 1932
Agfa was the first company to offer a film-based version of their
Agfa-Farbenplatte (Agfa color plate), enabling Leica owners for the first time
to take color photographs.
Agfacolor
But there were still
drawbacks. The Autochrome and Agfa
systems were notoriously slow. The RGB
filters absorbed a huge amount of light.
Anothr process was needed to solve that problem.
In 1912 Rudolph Fisher at
Agfa discovered chemicals would react to the silver halides in the emulsion and
convert other compounds into insoluble dyes.
These color forming ingredients, called dye couplers, could be included
in the emulsion. Fisher’s work resulted
in researching three emulsion layers in films to form a color image. Initial trials were unsuccessful because some
of the color dyes migrated from one emulsion layer to the other during
development.
This was the case with
Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, who worked at the Kodak laboratories in Rochester,
New York. To solve the problem, they
switched to including the dyes in the developer. This resulted in a breakthrough, and in 1935
the first three emulsion layer color film became reality, the Kodachrome. Because the dye couplers of this film were
added during the developing stage, it was necessary to send the film to Kodak
to have it processed.
The first color film to
incorporate the dye couplers in the emulsion was the Agfacolor Neu (new) in
1936. It was the first time that
photographers were able develop their own color film. The Neu designation was used to distinguish these
Agfacolor films from their previous Agfacolor films. Both Kodachrome and Agfacolor very quickly
spelled the end of Autochrome and other, similar films.
Both Kodachrome and Agfacolor
were available as 35mm films giving Leica owners and owners of other 35mm
cameras for the first time convenient and reliable means to take color
photographs. It is interesting to note that both companies initially marketed their films with the reference to Leica and other 35mm cameras.
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Do you have any idea how Agfa finally solved the problem of color coupler migration to the other emulsion layers? I understand Kodaks solution with the Kodachrome, but that turned out to be somewhat of a hassle since it required for the film to be sent to a processing lab.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Kodachrome was a bit of a hassle to get processed. That obviously is the very reason why all the other Kodak transparency films later on used essentially the same process as initially developed by Agfa.
DeleteI am not a chemist, but as I understand it, Agfa's solution was in a way ingeniously simple. The emulsion structure of film is relatively coarse as far as the silver halides are concerned. To prevent color couple migration, they simply made the resulting color coupler large enough that they could not pass the general structure of the emulsion. With other words, the color couplers got stuck in their respective emulsion layers.
Dear Heinz, May i ask in which book/where you found the image of the butterflies made by John Joly?
ReplyDeleteOriginally I saw the picture a while ago in the book by John Hedgecoe "The Art Of Color Photography". I did a fair amount of research for the article which revealed many of the photographs I used, including the butterfly picture. Where particularly I found the one of the butterflies by Joly I don't recall.
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