Talk:Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Color printing
The information that Prokudin-Gorskii didn't have color printing method seems wrong. He used color printing method "carbo", published number of color postcards and had color printing company. Two of his color prints are published in the Svetlana Garanina's excellent biography article at: http://www.prokudin-gorsky.ru/downloads.shtml It contains some other details and corrections relative to LOC's exposition biography.

Honza

Gallery
This page is becoming a photo gallery. In future, people can go to the commons site if they want to view all these pictures, and I reccomend only a selection be shown in the actual page. Dave 11:38, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Self-referencing
This article contains a lot of self-references. I'm thinking of the Gallery header, which should be removed or reworked entirely, and List of photographs, which is entirely self-referencing and even wikilinks to a category within the article. What do you think? Jobjörn (Talk ° contribs) 00:36, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Source for high-res pictures
From where are the hi-resolution versions of theimages taken? The LOC on-line exhibit doesn't seem to have any pictures at such a high resolution. 70.226.144.242 03:00, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

ah, I see. I guess I just wasn't looking hard enough: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/p?pp/prok:@band(color+rendering) has resonably high resolutions for a lot of the pictures. 70.226.144.242 03:02, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Failed GA nomination
I failed this GA because, if it's supposed to be some kind of biography, it's just a stub. I'm not failing it based on length, but on information. The only information in here is about his photography; no biological, early life, relationship info. Also several small, but important things:


 * The first image caption says it's a self-portrait. That makes it sound like it was a painting. I did a double-take when I read that.

Now you might term it a selfie.... :-) Actio (talk) 02:47, 26 July 2021 (UTC)


 * The other image looks like it should be in the Techniques section, but...


 * The Techniques and Photography section could be easily merged...although that's pretty much the whole article.

--Dark Kubrick 19:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * References only go directly after periods or commas, not in the middle of sentences.

List of photographs
Moved from article page. Prokudin-Gorskii's photos appear in the Category:Prokudin-Gorskii images and the following articles:

Sochi | Gagra | Lugano | Staritsa | Ostashkov | Torzhok | Kem (town) | Vladikavkaz | Ufa | Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery | Vorotynsky | Volga-Baltic Waterway | Trans-Siberian Railway | Lavr Proskuryakov | Dimitry of Rostov | Vladimir | Ladoga | Bacchá | Uglich | Zubtsov | Pederasty | Prisoner of war | World War I | Kostroma | Alim Khan | Itchan Kala | Mozhaysk | Belozersk | Polotsk | Still life | Rostov | Solovki | Solovetsky Monastery | Dagestan | Yurt | Windmill | Samarkand | Uzbek | Tajiks | Smolensk | Cathedral of the Assumption, Smolensk | Kremlin | Daugavpils | Rzhev | Lake Sterzh | Sterzh Cross | Karelia | Borjomi | Tobolsk | Tyumen | Zlatoust | Petrozavodsk | Lodeinoe Pole | Poppy | Melon | Emir | Lake Ladoga | Chusovaya | Tian Shan | Chechenya | Tea | Cotton | Electrical generator | History of Siberia | Hookah -- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.4.133.250 (talk • contribs) 21:28, 3 October 2006.


 * Whilst not really appropriate on the article page (The Wikimedia Commons link is a better route to more Prokudin-Gorskii photos), there is no harm in maintaining this list of related articles on the talk page. -- Solipsist 20:41, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * At the moment I can't find the appropriate section of the Manual of Style or other guidelines, but User:Jobjörn was basically correct that Wikipedia articles should avoid self references. That is to say this article is really about Prokudin-Gorskii, so this list of articles is more about the structure of Wikipedia not Prokudin-Gorskii's life. That is to say there is no particular reason that a reader interested in Prokudin-Gorskii would also be interested in reading about Sochi.
 * The one benefit they do provide is a means for readers to find more examples of Prokudin-Gorskii's photos. But that is more concisely acheived with the Commons link to Commons:Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii at the top of the External links section. -- Solipsist 21:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Not sure if this is of any real value but there might be some additional images being published.
 * A number of images by Prokudin-Gorskii have been published on the YLE news site to announce the exhibition of a range of pictures that are available to view at the South-Karelian Museum in Lappenranta until 2017/04/02.  He died 72 years ago so many of the images should fall into the public domain soon I hope.
 * Some points from the news article in brief.
 * Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863–1944) a scientist and photographer from St Petersburg. Set out in 1909 on a colour photo excursion, four years before the Limier brothers were selling their Autochrome plates in France. Some pictures from Viipuri / Vyborg (previously in Finland) and lake Saimaa are included.
 * He captured in colour a picturesque spot on the Saimaa canal that had appeared in black and white taken by I.K. Inhan published in a 1986 picture book on Finland.
 * He was a pioneer and left Russia after the revolution to work in the dark in Europe. His original negative collection has only received significant publicity this last century.
 * In 1909 Kaiser Nikolai II gave him his own railway coach that was fitted with a darkroom to allow him to develop negatives on the spot. This was used at the start of the widespread photography of Russia.  In 1914 at the start of the first world war the railway coach was taken away for more needed use.
 * Idyllic press (talk) 10:37, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Exposure time
One thing that may be of interest and IMHO we should mention is what sort of exposure time are we talking about here? Obviously it's going to depend a lot of the conditions and I would assume it would be about 3x normal exposure times for those days but many people would probably have no idea what that would be. Nil Einne 16:26, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * This is what P-G claims in his letter to Leo Tolstoi


 * At this time, now that the process of taking photographs using my method and my plates requires from one to three seconds, I permit myself to ask your permission for me to visit for one or two days (keeping in mind the state of your health and the weather), thereby in order to take several color pictures of you and your spouse...


 * Later he mentions 20 seconds exposure due to weather conditions. Exposing through color filter takes significandly longer than exposure without filter and red filter took about twice as long as the other two separations. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokhtml/prokcompos.html compute exposure time based on moon movement during the separations, result is over minute.  --Honza (talk) 14:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Looking at the ghosting caused people who are most likely walking, at animals like cats, horses etc., and at the smoke from factory chimneys the combined exposure time of the three images cannot have been longer than a few seconds on a sunny day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.183.16.154 (talk) 16:14, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

The entity(ies) on the railroad tracks (three colored blotches in color, three ghosts in black and white) at http://content.wdl.org/5587/service/thumbnail/1430167600/1024x1024/1/1.jpg and http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/prok.01571/?co=prok could be relevant to deduction of the time-lapse between exposures, IF you know that entity's speed, how to translate the length of track in the flat photo to length of track in real life, etc.2604:2000:C6AA:B400:206C:BE94:70F5:F5C (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Photo gallery
That guy's photographs look newer than the captions say they are. I think the color might have been added on later. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Scott Gall (talk • contribs) 05:13, 30 March 2007 (UTC).


 * From some points of view you are right the color were really added in 2000s. Please read the article carefuly. --Li-sung 14:43, 30 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The photos aren't as impressive knowing that a photographer spent "six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct" each photo. Is there anywhere where we can see what the photos originally looked like? 76.121.211.59 (talk) 17:43, 30 April 2011 (UTC)


 * You can compare this raw, unadjusted (I've double-checked by experiment) composite of the Emir of Bukhara's portrait (top, original glass plate negative also shown but digitally inverted into a positive) with the painstakingly adjusted version currently used in the present article (bottom) to get some idea of the typical overhauling. It's the sort of work that might reasonably be done to spruce up any deteriorated or defective color snapshot in a family photo album, or an old oil painting, for that matter, and nothing that really crosses over the line into falsification or guesswork. Purplish color cast corrected, areas of uneven color due to emulsion damage or deterioration locally adjusted to even them out, spots and other small blemishes removed by retouching, density and contrast curve optimized, with a bit of "blooming" in the very brightest colors as a consequence of increased contrast, but no color that wasn't really there in 1911.


 * The cleaned and polished version is probably more like what P-G would have seen on a ground glass focusing screen in his camera, while the raw version, minus the local damage due to later deterioration, is probably fairly close to what the Tsar would have seen projected on a screen at one of P-G's presentations at the palace. The exact color balance and saturation would have depended on the balance and saturation of the color filters used in the projector and the evenness of its lighting. If the projector offered some means of adjusting the relative brightness of each component, an unwanted color cast like the purplish tone in this image could have been reduced or eliminated. Some color correction was also possible when printing the negatives to make the glass positives that were actually projected, and many digital image editing procedures are simply the quick, easy and less detectable modern equivalents of low-tech manual adjustment and retouching techniques available a hundred years ago.


 * Where the "digichromatography" treatment does cross the line into historical revisionism, IMHO, is when it "corrects" color fringes caused by subject motion—slight changes in posture, involuntarily twitching fingers, clothing agitated by a passing breeze—by stretching and twisting small areas of one or more of the color components into compliance to make everything match perfectly. The Emir and his regalia appear to have held rock-steady during the exposures, so no excuse for such plastic surgery seems to have arisen in this instance. AVarchaeologist (talk) 09:09, 31 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Agree. Also see WP:IMAGE—straightforward non-motion colour tweaks and other cleanup is allowed ("best judgment"). Except here it is outside image experts rather than unvetted WPdians doing the manipulations. No matter who does it, these accuracy-conscious tweaks enhance encyclopedic value and are not at all misleading. Saravask 06:27, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * It's okay to crop the Newman photo of Stravinsky in an article about Stravinsky, if your intent is merely to document what Stravinsky looked like at that age. But it'd be vandalism (and un-encyclopedic) to crop it, and represent it as being, in the cropped state, Newman's expression, in an article about Newman. Newman DELIBERATELY made the "mistake" of not centering the human subject. Prokudin-Gorskyi KNOWINGLY chose a process that'd document motion in its way. Ergo he WANTED to do so. P-G made a still photo of wind by capturing some fabric that moved. Repairing the damage of time and the elements to a negative vs. its state at creation is permissible, but it's a sin to remove his opalescent lusters on smoke, steam, and moving waters, or the Irish Tricolor resulting when a tiny toddler with white head-kerchief is (adorably) unable to freeze between exposures. The most barbaric case of this was erasing the life-form(s) on the railroad tracks in

http://content.wdl.org/5587/service/thumbnail/1430167600/1024x1024/1/1.jpg


 * from another online copy. I saw the "correct" one first. Upon seeing the REAL one years later, I realized the fraud and thievery it had been to tell the public that this was a photo "by Prokudin-Gorskii" (a false representation of his intent, which was in truth to include the three colored blotches into which his chosen and intended process would render the moving thing on the tracks, an intent without which he'd simply have waited mere seconds for it to get out of the way) while NOT MENTIONING the erasure of said object. Their retention contributes IMMENSELY to the "encyclopedic value", because: (a) we can analyze (1) the negative's movement up and down in the camera, (2) the chronological order of color-shots, and (3) the time between (and during) shutter-clicks; and (b) it preserves the historical fact that the object or person WAS THERE. I thought it didn't become acceptable to erase "undesirable" Russians from photos until Stalin.2604:2000:C6AA:B400:206C:BE94:70F5:F5C (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Spelling
I've seen different ways of spelling Prokudin-Gorsky's full name, so I did a google search to see which way of spelling gave the most hits. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii gave around 25,000 results, while Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky only gave about 250 hits. Even when omitting his middle name, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii had overwhelmingly more hits than Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Therefore I think the name of this article should be changed into Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii.

/Cyan
 * Romanization of Russian names in Wikipedia is per Russian language romanization guideline. Exceptions are possible, but not based on google hits alone.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thanks for informing me. /Cyan


 * I see it in the article on Penkovsky too. When these people wrote their own names they ended with the Russian letter for an "i" or "ee" sound, followed by the same letter with the diacritical-mark for "palatalizing" which is just adding a "y" in front. A Russian reciting this name would end it in either "Gorskiyee" or "Gorskeeyee". Transliterating that using only one vowel defies logic. But probably the world's major English newspapers and English print-encyclopedias follow that same error. Good-bye, i.e. Cyanara!2604:2000:C6AA:B400:206C:BE94:70F5:F5C (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson

Looking at where many of his works are housed, The Library of Congress, shows Gorsk"ii". Not to mention many of the citations in this very article have the "ii" spelling. I've also seen other links to this page with the "ii" and "y" in Wikipedia on the Color Photography page specifically. I understand Wikipedia has guidelines for the ий ending to his name, but I'm curious if there should be a mention on this page? Something more prominent in order to help readers understand there are multiple ways to spell it due to the English translation. If we add a small snippet at the bottom of the page it could help curb public confusion on which is the correct spelling, and can keep some sort of silly spelling edit war from happening across the site. Omnius (talk) 14:31, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Three color photography
It seems that this article should be split into article on three color photography, technique pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron, Adolf Miethe and others and mastered by Prokudin-Gorsky and the remainder of article about Prokudin-Gorsky life and work.

--Honza (talk) 14:35, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Yep. And the intro might very well state that P-G did not actually invent the three-colour process (a statement one see all over the net). As such his inclusion in the timeline over at color photography seems a bit out of place, while he's certainly interesting due to the massive volume of his work, that's about it when one examines the issue critically. 130.232.214.10 (talk) 13:21, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Patents
It would be interesting to read Prokudin-Gorsky's publications and fill in some details of his work. None of the journals seem to be freely available online however. I tried finding the patents mentioned in the article, and stumbled upon a bit more than I expected. Please do something to the table if it's too big here.

Patents by colleagues: I couldn't find anything Italian even though the article claims he had patents there too. Anything feel like digging in to see if these have anything understandable? :) --Anttique (talk) 13:29, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

A useful clarification would be ...
I had to struggle to make sense out of the terminology of "red", "green", and "blue for the filters in light of the cyan, magenta, and yellow at http://content.wdl.org/5587/service/thumbnail/1430167600/1024x1024/1/1.jpg . The text "; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow," was of no help at first. To most people, the complementary colors of "red, green, and blue" are "green, red, and orange" respectively. I was still puzzled until I read the article on Complementary Colors to find that in another system those are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Might you rewrite it like this: "; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the colors complementary to red (cyan), to green (magenta) and to blue (yellow)"? Even the addition of the word "respectively" would have made it easier than it was. I DID eventually catch on but it was a lot of head-scratching, work, and I had to read another article. I'd like the next reader not to have to work so hard. Also, mightn't the next reader NOT work so hard to make sense but just give up and quit reading BEFORE "getting it"? Please revise. Thanks.2604:2000:C6AA:B400:206C:BE94:70F5:F5C (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson


 * It pains me to read of your struggle, but the alternative to providing links to the complementary colors and subtractive color articles in that sentence would be to delve into those subjects in some depth on the spot, which is clearly beyond this article's proper scope. Your suggestion about using some permutation involving the word "respectively" seems reasonable enough, except that while that might have been enlightening for you, it might cause even more perplexity to some other reader with a different knowledge set serving as their background. There may be no reasonable alternative to some head-scratching and consequent link-following for readers not already generally familiar with those subjects. Understanding the basics of RGB color is essential to understanding the technical aspects of P-G's photography, and understanding the interrelationship of RGB and CMY, so often now spoken of as if they were separate and incompatible color universes, is essential to understanding how CMY prints can be made from RGB negatives. It seems to me that both of those educational tasks are best and properly served by linking to the relevant articles. 66.249.172.141 (talk) 08:34, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

An inquiry
With respect to the horse and rider (three colored blotches at) http://content.wdl.org/5587/service/thumbnail/1430167600/1024x1024/1/1.jpg and in black and white, offering many sizes http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/prok.01571/?co=prok This article makes it clear that the figure on the railroad tracks is moving away from us. The first exposure was
 * Yellow smudge on output
 * Blue filter on lens
 * Top negative on strip
 * (Bottom of strip when it was upside-down in camera)

and the last exposure was
 * Cyan smudge on output
 * Red filter on lens
 * Bottom negative on strip
 * (Top of strip when it was upside-down in camera).

All of that must be true to agree with this article's statements on which spot on the negative and which color would be done first, and which last, and it's not likely this article is wrong on those points.

If the figure is moving away from us, any ideas what it is? In a download of the largest size of the b/w's Yellow shot it appears to have the four legs and hooves of a horse coming towards us, but it MUST have been moving in the other direction. It cannot be moving VERY slowly, for the woman where the grass turns into gravel/dirt does not move much between the first and second shutter-clicks.2604:2000:C6AA:B400:206C:BE94:70F5:F5C (talk) 07:10, 19 November 2015 (UTC)Christopher L. Simpson


 * When I first encountered that image long ago, I read the figure as simply a person walking along the tracks, apparently bending down in the first (yellow) of the three positions, perhaps to glean a bit of coal or adjust their footwear. Now that you point out the other figure, which I had previously overlooked and which provides a solid reference for human scale (although the spacing of the tracks ought to have clued me in), and with the benefit of this higher-resolution composite, it is finally clear to me that it is a man on horseback, evidently covering a greater distance during the first exposure than during the other two. Even the best panchromatic emulsions of that era were more sensitive to blue light than to green or red (or at the least not less sensitive), so the fact that the blue-filtered exposure, responsible for the yellow "ghost", contains the blurriest figure must be due to some spurt of forward progress by the animal rather than a longer exposure time.


 * As time-stamped by the sequence of filter colors typical of P-G's photographs (I am aware of only one exception to his usual B-G-R sequence: a lone view of a seaside fishing village, featuring some painted signage in French), definitely moving away from us. Note that the colors of the "ghosts" in examples like this depend on whether the moving figure is darker than the background, as it is here, or lighter. Because these are additive color images, where the blue-filtered image was darkened by the presence of the figure, the remaining green plus red light produce a yellow "ghost"; if the figure were clad in white, the "ghost" would be blue, and so on accordingly for the other additive primary and secondary colors. 66.249.172.141 (talk) 07:49, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

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color ghosts
In the caption of the shot of Pinchas Karlinskiy by a river, what do y'all think of adding a note about the color patches caused by movement of ripples? —Tamfang (talk) 22:55, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

RGB vs BGR
Surely the blue channel is the one in which the blue shirt is brightest, not darkest! —Tamfang (talk) 22:31, 1 May 2023 (UTC)