All photography was
originally monochrome, or black-and-white.
Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography
continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its
"classic" photographic look. It is important to note that some
monochromatic pictures are not always pure blacks and whites, but also contain
other hues depending on the process. The cyanotype process produces an image of
blue and white for example. The albumen process, first used more than 150 years
ago, produces brown tones.
Many photographers
continue to produce some monochrome images, often because of the established
archival permanence of well processed silver halide based materials.
Some full color
digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black and
whites, and some manufacturers produce digital cameras that exclusively shoot
monochrome.
Color
photography was explored beginning in the mid-19th century.
Early experiments in color required extremely long exposures (hours or days for
camera images) and could not "fix" the photograph to prevent the
color from quickly fading when exposed to white light.
The first permanent color photograph was taken in
1861 using the three-color-separation principle first published by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. Maxwell's
idea was to take three separate black-and-white photographs through red, green
and blue filters. This provides the photographer with
the three basic channels required to recreate a color image. Transparent prints
of the images could be projected through similar color filters and superimposed
on the projection screen, an additive
method of color reproduction. A color print on paper could be
produced by superimposing carbon prints of
the three images made in their complementary colors, a subtractive
method of color reproduction pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron in the late 1860s.
Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made
extensive use of this color separation technique, employing a special camera
which successively exposed the three color-filtered images on different parts
of an oblong plate. Because his exposures were not
simultaneous, unsteady subjects exhibited color "fringes" or, if
rapidly moving through the scene, appeared as brightly colored ghosts in the
resulting projected or printed images.
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