Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 22))

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY.

DURING the last twenty years we have been periodically informed
by the daily press that color photography was an accomplished
fact. Every time some excitable individual got a little chemical
discoloration on his photographic plate or paper, the news was
sent sizzling over the globe and color photography was announced in big
type, corporations were formed, and good friends were given another chance
to invest in a sure thing. As usual, the public soon yawned at this perpetual
cry of “wolf,” but somehow capital kept up its faith. It was only a year ago
that a very prominent French financier came to me, breathless with excite-
ment over a few very good three-color carbon prints—a clever English shark
was trying to interest capital in his “ discovery.” Millions have surely been
buried in fake schemes, to say nothing of the millions spent in earnest, but
commercially fruitless, research.
When the Lumière brothers published the description of their process,
several years ago, it was naturally duly recorded by the photographic press,
and it even got into some of the big dailies—at least as padding; but those
of us that were puttering along with the various three-color methods watched
for results with much interest, especially when we heard that a special plant
was being put up to manufacture the plates. From time to time one heard
rumors of a man that had seen one of the results, and the report was: “true
coloring, green grass, red tie,” and so on. The first specimens the makers
showed us would have been as discouraging as such rumors had been,
did one not remember the results that makers of plates and papers
generally exhibit as “ samples ”; but the working process seemed so
fascinatingly simple that the very next day I tried them myself, and
the first results brought the conviction that color photography had come
to stay.
Of course the Autochrome process is not a discovery in the science of
color photography, for the principles of the process were described by Ducos
du Hauron, in 1868 ; in fact the development of the fundamental theories of
three-color photography are ascribed to Maxwell, as far back as 1861. Other
inventors have been and are still working on polychrome screen-processes-
amongst the better known are Joly, MacDonough, Powrie-Warner, Krayn,
Brasseur, Mees, and Smith. The Société Jougla, in Paris, is soon to market
a polychrome plate, made under the supervision and according to the patents
of Ducos du Hauron and Raymond Bergecol; and a number of other plates
will probably soon be available, which promise to do even better than the
Lumière plates—but that remains to be demonstrated. In any case, from a
pictorial standpoint, the Lumière plate for the present holds a unique field.
The fine, irregular grain of this plate gives a beautiful, vibrant quality to the
light, that I do not think any of the mosaic or line screen-plates, with their
absolute regularity, can give. I am, however, very anxious to try some
plate that has a coarser screen, for it should, apparently, be more luminous
in color rendering.


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