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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Old color phtographers

I was about to put up some old color family photographs and noticed the quality of these pictures were rather poor. Not only because the technology wasn't mature in the 60s and 70s, we also switched to 35mm format exclusively due to the cost of color film. Black and white family pictures prior to the color era were taken with the much bigger 6x6 Rolliecord Pa bought around 1959 (according to camera serial number).

Then I remember seeing a set of old pictures several years ago, this is one example:



From the same collection, a Chinese man in Chakva, Georgia, on the eastern coast of Black Sea.
Black Sea was warm and humid enough to grow tea, this proud looking guy was in charge of the tea farm.


I had to google for it, would you believe Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took these truly beautiful pictures between 1909-1915 on a project financed by Tsar Nicholas II?  


Below is one of our better color photographs taken around 1970, at that time only Robin and Cate were in America and the Golden Gate Bridge was as exotic to us (in Hong Kong) as Sergei's Russian Empire.  After some photoshop, it is still nowhere as good as the 100 year old pictures.






Then it got much worse, instead of expensive color labs we started to get mini-labs in the drugstores. 



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