Previously seen 749 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517
Huh, interesting. Well, there's a lot of new people here since 749 days ago (including me) so I suppose it can't hurt to see it again!
Russia in color, a century ago
21–30 of 196 posts
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure he was able to view them well using a projector. Displays like that were the initial purpose of photography like this. Positives of these would have overlapped to make up the same images you see here. By the way, I think it's sort of a shame to even compare smartphone digital photos to film photography. Of course they look better.
Do you happen to have any insight into the processing of the film? I'm very curious as to how you'd process the plates into the specific colors needed for this to get anything close to life-like representations. I imagine these representations of the photos were taken from the raw negatives.
Judging by some of the artifacts i saw in the images i'm not even sure it was film. I think it may have been glass plates that were used for these. In a few there are areas where it looks like the substrate had flaked off of the negative when they made the positives.
Given that wikipedia says that film was starting to take over around this era I'd say that it's quite possible that it was all photographic plates since to do this well with something you'd have to have a good amount of experience with it and I wonder how much film and the processing would have reached Russia yet by then.
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#23I was first amazed at the quality, then surprised that these were taken more recently than I expected, in 1910. Then, I realized that, duh, that was 102 years ago. It's strange how even 100+ years ago is getting more and more recent. (Obviously, that's how it works. But perception lags quite a bit.)
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#24No one is smiling. Not even the kids. Maybe the woman in #20 is, who knows? I know in general 'old time' photos didn't have people smiling much - very posed pictures and stoic expressions. I wonder if they had any idea how much this would color our impression of them 100+ years later?
I think smiling for a photograph must be some sort of social training that humans either take to or don't.
I, for example, still find it very difficult and unnatural to smile for photographs unless I am already smiling about something else and the picture is just a candid moment caught at that time.
I would imagine that this old picture taking process (3 separate pictures with different filters each time) took quite a bit of time and subjects had to be posed for a a longer period of time. It would be very difficult to hold a smile for that long, and especially in those early photography days when the smiling-for-pictures convention still hasn't been established.
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you happen to have any insight into the processing of the film? I'm very curious as to how you'd process the plates into the specific colors needed for this to get anything close to life-like representations. I imagine these representations of the photos were taken from the raw negatives.
They were black and whites taken with color filters over the lens (R, G, B). Project each of the three in its corresponding color and overlap them to produce a full-color photo. Overlap them in that color in Photoshop to produce the digital images you see here.
How would you project them in their corresponding colors, though? I'd imagine you would have to produce prints in the colors. Only other thing I can think of is to project the negatives with R/G/B colored light behind them and make those projections line up.
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#26Strangely enough most of the photos now would not be considered those of Russia, but would be other distinct countries.
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#27Note that those shown are all heavily restored (also cropped) versions of the originals. They are all from the Library of Congress collection (~1900 of the ~3500 he made). An example of an unrestored version for comparison is at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/item/prk20000025... .
Honestly, even those in the link are impressive to me. Just think of where technology was at that point in time, and what ingenuity it took to create pictures of this quality.
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because film captures details in molecules while a CCD sensor in your digital camera uses picture elements much, much, much larger than molecules. Or, because it's analog. It's very similar to sound recordings. Whether magnetic or not (say, in vinyl) the resolution of the captured signal can approach the molecular. Digital has a discreet resolution limited by the capturing equipment; for example, CDs reproduce the vo…
The spacial resolution of analog photographs is not at the scale of individual molecules. It is limited by the "grain" of the film [1]. Other factors include distortions from lens shape imperfections in the lens material. Audio tapes record their signal in magnetic domains. These are areas of tape the are large enough to be written and read. Much larger than anything approaching the scale of individual molecules. Sou…
I figured my layman explanation would suffice. While we're in the realm of correct details, it's also worth nothing that with each use of a needle dragged through a groove (or even with magnetic tape dragging across all the bits in the tape machine) the surface is degraded and the original recording along with it. Less fidelity, more noise ... hiss, pop, crack
Digital gives us error correction so that even when the physical media starts to degrade (taking the signal with it) our firmware and our software work out where the mistakes exist and attempt to correct them. Of course, once the signal has degraded beyond the point of recoverability, you "suddenly" have a catastrophic failure. (And this is why backups are important...)
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Of course they look better. Why?
Because film captures details in molecules while a CCD sensor in your digital camera uses picture elements much, much, much larger than molecules. Or, because it's analog. It's very similar to sound recordings. Whether magnetic or not (say, in vinyl) the resolution of the captured signal can approach the molecular. Digital has a discreet resolution limited by the capturing equipment; for example, CDs reproduce the vo…
We're actually approaching, if not have passed, the resolution of standard film with some higher end SLRs [1, 2]; at least in a total-usable-pixels perspective; but of course at the sub-pixel level, we're still very far off with only 14 bits per channel. There's also the question of how the total pixels are arranged, since each bit of the sensor is only absorbing one color, etc; but in time, at least as far as resolution is concerned, digital will or has surpassed analogue.
[1] http://www.mindspring.com/~lorqvonray/Sticker-5mp-Velvia.htm...
[2] http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summa...
Some ludicrous camera resolutions. Please not I'm trying to bring up cameras that are full-frame and have ludicrous sensor resolutions, so the arguments of "light doesn't work right at these densities" doesn't fly as easily, since the density is still relatively low:
http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d800/
http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/products/cameras/slr_...
Re: Russia in color, a century ago
#30Looking at these feels like time travel.