It’s black and white… in colour
Colour photography has been possible for more than 150 years. Possible, yes; easy, no. And it didn’t help that early colour pictures were shot in black & white. Confused? Don’t be. All will be explained. What I want to explore here principally is a camera that was among the first to simplify colour photography. It was called the Hess-Ives Hicro. But let’s start by taking a look at what led up to it.
Three-colour systems
Way back in 1666 physicist Isaac Newton used a prism to show that sunlight could be split into the seven colours of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Nearly 200 years later Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell proved that those seven colours could be distilled down to just three – red, green and blue – and in so doing he took the first colour photograph in 1861.
Maxwell shot three pictures of a tartan ribbon on three monochrome photographic plates, each through a red, green or blue filter. The plates were processed to make black & white positives which were then projected using three magic lanterns (an early form of projector), each one through red, green and blue filters. When the three images were superimposed in register on a screen, the result was a full-colour picture.
To make the three exposures
