150 Years of Colour Photography

In this FotoTV film, photographer Gert Koshofer takes viewers on a journey through 150 years of colour film.

2011 was the 150th anniversary of the first exhibited colour photograph in May of 1861 in London, England. 1911 would make today the 100th anniversary first patent registration of the first multi-layer colour film which people know of today. 1936 would make today the 75th anniversary of the first multi-layered colour slide film of Kodachrome.

Koshofer starts out by showing viewers the first print from a slide film that was ever made. It is a photograph of a Scottish meal ribbon, made by Professor Maxwell and was made available to the public in 1861. It was a big problem for Professor Maxwell because he had to go through a very intricate process of creating three different liquid colour filters to be able to project the image. He then projected the images overlapping each other to demonstrate the full colour image. A very time consuming and difficult procedure compared to the simple slide as we know of today.

The first commercially successful colour film material was the Autochrome plate from the Lumiere brothers in their factory in Lyon, France. It was slide positive glass plates. It was unique because paper photos could only be created by very difficult means. The structure that made up the Autochrome plate was the grain pattern consisting of the finest elements made up of potato grain starch colored in green, magenta and orange and having a diameter of 0.01mm. The disadvantage however was the colour shift or colour clumping where colours could form unpleasant color shifts. The light sensitivity from the Autochrome plate was very nominal. In comparison to the ISO values we have today Autochrome had an ISO value of about minus 10.

Koshofer continues on to explain more exciting information about the history of colour film and photography, including the creation of Kodak Kodachrome, a film that was very popular and used world wide until it was taken out of production and off the market, the last developing being offered to customers until 2010.