We all have seen the incredible colored video footage and photo’s from WWII. I wasn’t aware that someone was already taking color photographs in the early 1900′s, until I came across a book called: Prokudin Gorsky True Colours (a Dutch book)
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a photographer with a background in chemistry. Together with Adolf Miethe they worked on colour dyes and three-colour photography. Adolf asked a certain Wilhelm Bermpohl to build him a camera. The Bermpohl Naturfarbenkamera was born. This camera basically splits the light and projecting the image onto three film plates. Color filters in front of each film plate renders the black-and-white image suitable for a three-color printing process: red, green & blue.
But this was in 1928. Before that Sergey used a similar technique, but his process used a camera that took a series of three pictures in sequence – and not at the same time. This meant that any movement showed up in the prints as multiple “ghosted” images.
His work is amazing. You can achieve something similar in Photoshop and After Effects, by splitting the channels and off-setting them. But since this is not a Tutorial site, I won’t really go into it :)
