Color Photography

The foundation of virtually all practical color processes, the three-color

method was first suggested in an 1855 paper by Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell, with the first color photograph produced
by Thomas Sutton for a Maxwell lecture in 1861.Color photography has
been the dominant form of photography since the 1970s, with
monochrome photography mostly relegated to niche markets such as art
photography.

The first color photograph made by the three-color method suggested

by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton. The
subject is a colored ribbon, usually described as a tartan ribbon.
A 1914 color photograph of the Taj Mahal published in a 1921 issue
of National Geographic magazine

In 1935, American Eastman Kodak introduced the first modern "integral

tripack" color film and called it Kodachrome, a name recycled from an
earlier and completely different two-color process. Its development was
led by the improbable team of Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky,
Jr. (nicknamed "Man" and "God"), two highly regarded classical
musicians who had started tinkering with color photographic processes
and ended up working with the Kodak Research Laboratories.
Kodachrome had three layers of emulsion coated on a single base, each
layer recording one of the three additive primaries, red, green, and blue.
In keeping with Kodak's old "you press the button, we do the rest"
slogan, the film was simply loaded into the camera, exposed in the
ordinary way, then mailed to Kodak for processing. 
THE WORLD’S FIRST DIGITAL CAMERA

Steven Sasson invented the world’s first digital camera while working at

Eastman Kodak in 1975. It weighed around 8 pounds (3.6kg) and shot a
mere 0.01MP. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come since those early
days.  We’ve gone from 30 images on a delicate cassette to thousands
on something as small as a fingernail.
The most commonly used method of obtaining color information in digital
photography is the use of a Bayer filter, invented by Bryce
Bayer of Eastman Kodak in 1976. In this approach, a sensor that is
sensitive to multiple wavelengths of light is placed behind a color filter.
Traditionally, each pixel, or "sensel", is thereby assigned an additional
light response curve beyond its inherent differential response to different
wavelengths - typically the filters applied respond to red, blue and green,
the latter being used twice as often based on an argument that the
human eye is more sensitive to variation in green than any other color.
Thus, the color image produced would preserve color in a way
resembling human perception, and not appear unduly deteriorated in any
particular color range.
Incredible colour pictures of the Russian empire
Taken Between 1909 and 1915
By photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky had risen to fame thanks to his portrait of the

Russian author Leo Tolstoy after developing a system of colour
reproduction he called “optical colour projection” having studied in
Germany under Adolf Miethe.
The pioneering chemist and photographer had managed to get sponsorship
from Tsar Nicholas II due to his fame for an ambitious project using the
empire’s railways to capture life in the early part of the twentieth century.

Between 1909 and 1915 he travelled around Tsarist Russia in a special

railway carriage equipped with a mobile darkroom hoping to capture life-like
images in natural colour in the country’s remote regions.

The pictures reveal rural life in Russia as the First World War looms as well
as the Russian Revolution and the overthrowing of the Romanov family.

Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom, Vladimir Province in August 1863

started out as a chemist before his interest in photography took over.

His ground-breaking reproduction method was created by exposing three

glass plates through three different colour filters – green, red and blue –
and then combining them to form on composite image.

During his extensive trip he documented life as the country began to

change into an emerging industrial power and he documented the daily
lives of the country’s diverse population as well as old churches and
monasteries.

While some negatives were lost many ended up in the US Library of

Congress after he died in 1944 at the age of 81.