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Stereoscopic Photography

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Alejandro Carlos Calero
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29 views

Stereoscopic Photography

Uploaded by

Alejandro Carlos Calero
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Charles Wheatstone developed his mirror stereoscope around 1832, but did not really

publicize his invention until June 1838. He recognized the possibility of a


combination with photography soon after Daguerre and Talbot announced their
inventions and got Henry Fox Talbot to produce some calotype pairs for the
stereoscope. He received the first results in October 1840, but was not fully
satisfied as the angle between the shots was very big. Between 1841 and 1842 Henry
Collen made calotypes of statues, buildings and portraits, including a portrait of
Charles Babbage shot in August 1841. Wheatstone also obtained daguerreotype
stereograms from Mr. Beard in 1841 and from Hippolyte Fizeau and Antoine Claudet in
1842. None of these have yet been located.[59]

David Brewster developed a stereoscope with lenses and a binocular camera in 1844.
He presented two stereoscopic self portraits made by John Adamson in March 1849.
[60] A stereoscopic portrait of Adamson in the University of St Andrews Library
Photographic Archive, dated "circa 1845', may be one of these sets.[59] A
stereoscopic daguerreotype portrait of Michael Faraday in Kingston College's
Wheatstone collection and on loan to Bradford National Media Museum, dated "circa
1848", may be older.[61]

Color process
Main article: Color photography
A practical means of color photography was sought from the very beginning. Results
were demonstrated by Edmond Becquerel as early as the year of 1848, but exposures
lasting for hours or days were required and the captured colors were so light-
sensitive they would only bear very brief inspection in dim light.

The first color photograph was a set of three black-and-white photographs taken
through red, green, and blue color filters and shown superimposed by using three
projectors with similar filters. It was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for use in a
lecture by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who had proposed the method
in 1855.[62] The photographic emulsions then in use were insensitive to most of the
spectrum, so the result was very imperfect and the demonstration was soon
forgotten. Maxwell's method is now most widely known through the early 20th century
work of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. It was made practical by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel's
1873 discovery of a way to make emulsions sensitive to the rest of the spectrum,
gradually introduced into commercial use beginning in the mid-1880s.

Two French inventors, Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros, working unknown to
each other during the 1860s, famously unveiled their nearly identical ideas on the
same day in 1869. Included were methods for viewing a set of three color-filtered
black-and-white photographs in color without having to project them, and for using
them to make full-color prints on paper.[63]

The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, a
process inventors and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière began working on in the
1890s and commercially introduced in 1907.[64] It was based on one of Louis Duclos
du Haroun's ideas: instead of taking three separate photographs through color
filters, take one through a mosaic of tiny color filters overlaid on the emulsion
and view the results through an identical mosaic. If the individual filter elements
were small enough, the three primary colors of red, blue, and green would blend
together in the eye and produce the same additive color synthesis as the filtered
projection of three separate photographs.

Autochrome plates had an integral mosaic filter layer with roughly five million
previously dyed potato grains per square inch added to the surface. Then through
the use of a rolling press, five tons of pressure were used to flatten the grains,
enabling every one of them to capture and absorb color and their microscopic size
allowing the illusion that the colors are merged. The final step was adding a coat
of the light-capturing substance silver bromide, after which a color image could be
imprinted and developed. In order to see it, reversal processing was used to
develop each plate into a transparent positive that could be viewed directly or
projected with an ordinary projector. One of the drawbacks of the technology was an
exposure time of at least a second in bright daylight, with the time required
quickly increasing in poor light. An indoor portrait required several minutes with
the subject stationary. This was because the grains absorbed color fairly slowly,
and a filter of a yellowish-orange color was required to keep the photograph from
coming out excessively blue. Although necessary, the filter had the effect of
reducing the amount of light that was absorbed. Another drawback was that the image
could only be enlarged so much before the many dots that made up the image would
become apparent.[64][65]

Competing screen plate products soon appeared, and film-based versions were
eventually made. All were expensive, and until the 1930s none was "fast" enough for
hand-held snapshot-taking, so they mostly served a niche market of affluent
advanced amateurs.

A new era in color photography began with the introduction of Kodachrome film,
available for 16 mm home movies in 1935 and 35 mm slides in 1936. It captured the
red, green, and blue color components in three layers of emulsion. A complex
processing operation produced complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images in
those layers, resulting in a subtractive color image. Maxwell's method of taking
three separate filtered black-and-white photographs continued to serve special
purposes into the 1950s and beyond, and Polachrome, an "instant" slide film that
used the Autochrome's additive principle, was available until 2003, but the few
color print and slide films still being made in 2015 all use the multilayer
emulsion approach pioneered by Kodachrome.

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