When it comes to your hobbies or even career, it’s definitely important to know the history behind it. So, if photography is something that interests you, or if you are currently practicing it, make sure to study up and listen to when color photography came from or where it originated from.
One of the fascinating areas of photographic history involves trying to assess when each form of photography was invented. For instance, color photography didn’t come about until the 19th century, after it had been used for decades in black and white. This is a very interesting area of photography history.
Long before digital cameras came along, there were color photo processes like autochrome and cyanotypes. These old processes produced images using color film but in a tinted and toned manner. This means that the colors of an image would come out dull and not the vibrant and vivid quality of modern color photography.
“Color Photography” is a term coined by American photographers to refer to a style of photography that includes using a photographic color film to produce a finished image. In the early 20th century, photography moved from a black-and-white process to one that used color negatives in film photography.
The first color photographs were taken in 1839 by Englishman William Fox Talbot, using calotypes, a process that involved the camera obscura. A chemical reaction, either spontaneous or caused by exposure to light, produced the image on the paper. In 1843, Talbot published a booklet called “A Memoir of the Invention of the Blue, Violet, and Rose Painting on Paper.” The booklet is a series of plates from original experiments by Talbot. The images were based on the patterns of colored dots and lines that he had observed on the walls of his study.
As early as 1855, the Parisian photographer E.J. Bellocq was colorizing black-and-white photographs by painting over them with colored inks. In 1889, the camera was invented, but it took another 40 years for the first colored photographs to appear. It wasn’t until the 20th century when colors became a standard part of photographic processes.
Photography has been around for almost 200 years, and over that time, it has become one of the most popular ways to capture memories and share moments with friends and family. The invention of color photography is often credited to the Russian chemist-turned-photographer Alexander Graham Bell, which is ironic because he knew next to nothing about photography, save for the fact that it was a relatively new field.