Florida Memory is administered by the Florida Department of State, Division of Library and Information Services, Bureau of Archives and Records Management. The digitized records on Florida Memory come from the collections of the State Archives of Florida and the special collections of the State Library of Florida.
State Archives of Florida
- ArchivesFlorida.com
- State Archives Online Catalog
- ArchivesFlorida.com
- ArchivesFlorida.com
State Library of Florida
Related Sites
Listen: The Assorted Selections ProgramColor Photography
- There are several methods for taking a photograph in color, the earliest involved taking three separate exposures for each primary color and combining them.
- Later color films could capture most of the color spectrum in a single shot.
- Before color photography, some artists offered services coloring photos by hand.
History
Immediately after the invention of photography, people started looking for a way to add color to images. Color is a memorable and evocative part of visual reality, from the shades of a sunset to the glint in a special someone’s eye. For photography to completely represent the world, it had to capture the colors we can see. In the 1840s, many daguerreotypists hand painted individual photo plates; the result was a photo with color, but true color photography was decades away. The earliest methods for color photography involved taking three separate exposures, one for each of the primary colors of red, green, and blue, which were then overlaid into a single image.
Later methods, like Kodak’s wildly popular Kodachrome film, were all-in-one solutions that took three individual color exposures on a single sheet of film. Color photography was commercially viable as early as the 1930s, becoming the norm for film photography by the 1980s. Specifically, Kodachrome, a reversal film which produced a positive image over a transparent base, remained the most popular for still photography and home movies well into the 1990s, only being displaced by digital photography.
Did You Know?
Color photography is an extension of basic color theory. Some color photo processes use an additive method, which combines red, green and blue light. Others, like Kodak’s Kodachrome, used a subtractive method which exposed the full spectrum of light and then blocked out shades of yellow, magenta and cyan. Either method can produce a full range of color, with slight variations.
Outdoor portrait of Marie Osceola with her daughter Tammy at the Seminole Okalee Indian Village on Dania Reservation, ca. 1962 (State Archives of Florida)
