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> While working on one DARPA-funded project, Solomon stumbled upon a page in a century-old optics textbook that caught his eye. It described a method developed

> While working on one DARPA-funded project, Solomon stumbled upon a page in a century-old optics textbook that caught his eye. It described a method developed by noted physicist Gabriel Lippmann for producing color photographs. Instead of using film or dyes, Lippmann created photos by using a glass plate coated with a specially formulated silver halide emulsion. This method of color photography is absolutely fascinating and resulted in some of the best color photographs of the early 20th century. The Library of Congress has a collection [1] of plates by Prokudin-Gorskii who was hired by the Czar to ride around Russia on a train and photograph the country in the years before WWI and the Revolution. In the last couple of decades someone restored and digitally aligned each color plate so now we have nearly 1,500 relatively high resolution color photographs of imperial Russia. He took photos of everything from Emirs to peasant girls to Tolstoy and all the architecture and scenery in between. [1] https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/about-this-collection/ https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/about-this-...

formerly_proven 2y ago
Prokudin-Gorskii's images are fascinating, but he didn't use Lippmann plates. Gorskii took three images using red, green and blue filters. That was also much more practical, because I don't think you can reproduce Lippmann plates, while you can print a positive RGB image with CMY(K) dyes. That's why they're CMY after all (cyan absorbs red, magenta absorbs green, yellow absorbs blue).
- throwup238 2y ago
  Thank you for the correction! I didn’t realize that there were multiple different plate emulsion methods.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  This is the first I'm hearing about this lack of reproducibility, I can't make sense of it, you could always just take a picture of the resulting plate, no? Except color photos weren't a thing yet, so there just wasn't the technology at the time to make multiple copies?
  - ajb 2y ago
    Sounds plausible. A the start of the photo era, the state of the art for illustrations was for them to be drawn by an artist and then engraved on a wood block, manually, that was then used as a printing plate. There was a period when no method was available to convert photos to printing plates, so from that period you find prints of photos where someone has manually copied it to a wood engraving for publication.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Wow, reading the wiki article on Lippmann plates, sounds almost like a hologram - baking a diffraction pattern into glass that is then 'replayed' by white light. It puzzled me when it says one of the disadvantages was that the resulting plate could not be copied - like the optical effect doesn't work on film? I don't understand. Another citation regards this as a feature-not-a-bug, pointing to its use in security documents, apparently used on UK passports (identical hologram on all passports) and individuated holograms on new German passports. "Lippmann OVD" - optically variable device. https://holowiki.org/wiki/Lippmann_Security https://holowiki.org/wiki/Lippmann_Security
- andreareina 2y ago
  My read is that you can't make "prints" of it like you can with regular negatives. You probably could use a copy camera to make a copy of the plate but you're going to lose fidelity that way.
- mhalle 2y ago
  Lippmann photographs are like holograms, specifically reflection holograms. The image is exposed using self-interference, which works in what we would typically consider incoherent light due to a very short distance between the light and its reflection. Development of the plate produces a superposition of many different volume diffraction gratings mostly parallel to the surface of the plate. If the plate is bleached, these diffraction gratings become high efficiency phase gratings. For playback/viewing, light from the illumination source is both diffracted and filtered in wavelength by the volume diffraction gratings. In a hologram, the diffraction gives the multiple perspectives that make the medium so cool. For Lippmann photographs, the camera has removed most of the perspective information and the dichroic or interference filtering of the gratings is the primary effect. In either case, the final image is a layer free image bearing volume in the emulsion. That's why it can't be effectively copied using 2D techniques. Since the image is 2D (maybe slightly 3D? I'd have to think about that), it can be copied using a standard photographic technique. But the interference gratings in the emulsion have some angular dependence on the light source and viewer's angle that wouldn't be present in a 2D copy. In this way they also look a bit like a reflection hologram.
abe94 2y ago
very cool thanks for the link - do we know of any other photographers with similar styles?
- throwup238 2y ago
  Adolf Miethe (one of Prokudin-Gorskii's mentors) made a lot of photographs but I think most were black and white. Hans Hildenbrand took color photos in the German trenches during WWI [1] and 1920/30s Germany [2], Poland [3], Hungary [4], and possibly some other countries. The Auguste and Louis Lumière autochrome collections are also worth mentioning. Unfortunately none of them are as well restored and presented as the Library of Congress collection. A lot of their photos are in books like Endzeit Europa [5] and other commercial media instead of in the public domain. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/3460206/The-first-colour-photographs-from-the-German-front-line-during-World-War-One.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/autochrome-photography-archive-vintage-history https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/autochrom... [3] https://www.vintag.es/2013/03/color-photographs-of-life-in-poland-1932.html https://www.vintag.es/2013/03/color-photographs-of-life-in-p... [4] https://www.vintag.es/2012/12/beautiful-color-photos-of-hungary-in.html https://www.vintag.es/2012/12/beautiful-color-photos-of-hung... [5] https://www.amazon.de/Endzeit-Europa-kollektives-deutschsprachiger-Schriftsteller/dp/3835303473 https://www.amazon.de/Endzeit-Europa-kollektives-deutschspra...

formerly_proven 2y ago

Prokudin-Gorskii's images are fascinating, but he didn't use Lippmann plates. Gorskii took three images using red, green and blue filters. That was also much more practical, because I don't think you can reproduce Lippmann plates, while you can print a positive RGB image with CMY(K) dyes. That's why they're CMY after all (cyan absorbs red, magenta absorbs green, yellow absorbs blue).

throwup238 2y ago
Thank you for the correction! I didn’t realize that there were multiple different plate emulsion methods.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
This is the first I'm hearing about this lack of reproducibility, I can't make sense of it, you could always just take a picture of the resulting plate, no? Except color photos weren't a thing yet, so there just wasn't the technology at the time to make multiple copies?
- ajb 2y ago
  Sounds plausible. A the start of the photo era, the state of the art for illustrations was for them to be drawn by an artist and then engraved on a wood block, manually, that was then used as a printing plate. There was a period when no method was available to convert photos to printing plates, so from that period you find prints of photos where someone has manually copied it to a wood engraving for publication.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

Wow, reading the wiki article on Lippmann plates, sounds almost like a hologram - baking a diffraction pattern into glass that is then 'replayed' by white light. It puzzled me when it says one of the disadvantages was that the resulting plate could not be copied - like the optical effect doesn't work on film? I don't understand. Another citation regards this as a feature-not-a-bug, pointing to its use in security documents, apparently used on UK passports (identical hologram on all passports) and individuated holograms on new German passports. "Lippmann OVD" - optically variable device. https://holowiki.org/wiki/Lippmann_Security https://holowiki.org/wiki/Lippmann_Security

andreareina 2y ago
My read is that you can't make "prints" of it like you can with regular negatives. You probably could use a copy camera to make a copy of the plate but you're going to lose fidelity that way.
mhalle 2y ago
Lippmann photographs are like holograms, specifically reflection holograms. The image is exposed using self-interference, which works in what we would typically consider incoherent light due to a very short distance between the light and its reflection. Development of the plate produces a superposition of many different volume diffraction gratings mostly parallel to the surface of the plate. If the plate is bleached, these diffraction gratings become high efficiency phase gratings. For playback/viewing, light from the illumination source is both diffracted and filtered in wavelength by the volume diffraction gratings. In a hologram, the diffraction gives the multiple perspectives that make the medium so cool. For Lippmann photographs, the camera has removed most of the perspective information and the dichroic or interference filtering of the gratings is the primary effect. In either case, the final image is a layer free image bearing volume in the emulsion. That's why it can't be effectively copied using 2D techniques. Since the image is 2D (maybe slightly 3D? I'd have to think about that), it can be copied using a standard photographic technique. But the interference gratings in the emulsion have some angular dependence on the light source and viewer's angle that wouldn't be present in a 2D copy. In this way they also look a bit like a reflection hologram.

abe94 2y ago

very cool thanks for the link - do we know of any other photographers with similar styles?

throwup238 2y ago
Adolf Miethe (one of Prokudin-Gorskii's mentors) made a lot of photographs but I think most were black and white. Hans Hildenbrand took color photos in the German trenches during WWI [1] and 1920/30s Germany [2], Poland [3], Hungary [4], and possibly some other countries. The Auguste and Louis Lumière autochrome collections are also worth mentioning. Unfortunately none of them are as well restored and presented as the Library of Congress collection. A lot of their photos are in books like Endzeit Europa [5] and other commercial media instead of in the public domain. [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/3460206/The-first-colour-photographs-from-the-German-front-line-during-World-War-One.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/autochrome-photography-archive-vintage-history https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/autochrom... [3] https://www.vintag.es/2013/03/color-photographs-of-life-in-poland-1932.html https://www.vintag.es/2013/03/color-photographs-of-life-in-p... [4] https://www.vintag.es/2012/12/beautiful-color-photos-of-hungary-in.html https://www.vintag.es/2012/12/beautiful-color-photos-of-hung... [5] https://www.amazon.de/Endzeit-Europa-kollektives-deutschsprachiger-Schriftsteller/dp/3835303473 https://www.amazon.de/Endzeit-Europa-kollektives-deutschspra...