Recreating The Prokudin-Gorskii Discipline: or, how I shot color images with black-and-white film

This guy was so far ahead of his time, that it would be the equivalent of Leonardo DaVinci creating the iPad.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer who, in the early years of the 20th century, found a way to create color images from monochromatic photography.  He would expose three images on glass photographic plates, shooting each of the three images with a colored filter.  Then, he would project the images onto a screen – showing each image through that same colored filter – and lo and behold, we now have a color image!  In fact, over 2000 of Prokudin-Gorskii’s glass plates have survived and are in the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution, who have carefully scanned each image and restored the colors in a process called digichromatography.

Take a look at the images below.  What you’re seeing is Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara; he sat while Prokudin-Gorskii took his picture with a special three-lensed camera of Prokudin-Gorskii’s own invention – with each lens using a different filter.   Then, Prokudin-Gorskii would take his plates back to his darkroom – which happened to be in his private railroad car, another benefit of being the official photographer to the Tsar – and developed the images. And on the right – is the Emir of Bukhara, in full visual color.

At left: the original plates of Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, seated holding sword. At right: the reconstructed photo.  Photo by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Image from the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov

Is that not astounding or what?

Okay, time to break out the experiment tools.

The constants:

• Nikon F100 35mm camera, with a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens.
• Three screw-in filters; a Bower Red 2, a Tiffen Green and a Tiffen Blue.
• Four rolls of 35mm black-and-white film – Svema 64 film; ORWO NP55 film; Efke KB50 film and Kodak BW400CN film.
• My tripod, so that each of the three shots are taken from the exact same spot.
• And finally – something standing completely still and full of color.

For each subject, I first took a shot without any filters – or, essentially, I just used a “white” filter.

Then I added a Red filter – shot.  Then a Green filter – shot.  And then a Blue filter – shot.   This order must remain consistent throughout each attempt.  White.  Red.  Green. Blue.  W.R.G.B. Heck, I can remember this as easily as counting to six.

Saturday morning, bright and early.  I drove to the North Country and shot a few pictures here and there – used up the ORWO quickly, then ran through the Svema and the Kodak.  On Sunday, I took some more pictures, this time shooting in Halfmoon and Waterford along Route 32 – used the Efke film for that.

While I had to wait for McGreevy Pro Lab to open up on Monday morning before I could develop the non-Kodak film, I knew that since Kodak’s B&W film could be developed in a C-41 mixture, I took that cartridge of film over to Ritz Camera in Crossgates Mall, and let them do their magic.  A half hour later, the film was developed and paid for.

I scanned in each image, one by one, starting with a picture of a church in Porter Corners.  Here’s what it looks like as just a regular church with a regular photograph, on left; and at right, the three red-white-blue B&W photos combined as one.

Holy… okay, Chuck, it’s best not to use the words “Holy” and a barnyard expletive when one is discussing a photograph of a church. ‘Kay?  ‘Kay.

This was the first developed “test picture.”  I have to make sure that all three images are accurately aligned; even a pixel off one way or the other will cause the photo to look like a bad silk-screening.  And there’s nothing I can do about the clouds in the sky, short of either shooting when the sky is completely blue, or asking God to make the clouds hold still until I finish photographing.  Yeah, like that’ll work.

Meanwhile, I dropped off my three other B&W films – the ORWO, the Svema and the Efke – at McGreevy Pro Lab for development.   Yep, folks, say it with me.  It’s not a Monday morning until Chuck drops some film off at McGreevy.  Joe Putrock took my order.  I explained my plans for this film.  “Oh yeah,” he replied.  “There was a Russian guy who did this 100 years ago, he’s still considered the first color photographer.”

I smiled.  Joe knew what I was planning and how I wanted to do it.

On Tuesday afternoon, I got my films back.  Three rolls, all developed, no bad films in the batch.

First, I’m going to show you the straight “white filter” image – the one that if you just pointed the camera at a subject without any filters, you would get this.

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And after I combined the red – green – blue images that were taken immediately after taking the “white filter” image, here’s what I came up with.

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Results – promising. Very promising.  Better than I expected, but I have to work on alignments – especially if I ever decide to use the Svema on this – so that it doesn’t look like a photo clipped from page 1C of USA Today.  And I think I’m going to need a stronger blue filter – that water in the Waterford Bridge picture looks like it was filtered through chocolate.

Still, I like how this turned out, and I’m going to experiment with it some more.

Спасибо, Серге́й Миха́йлович Проку́дин-Го́рский​. Меня вдохновляет вашу работу.