- Otto Pfenninger
-
Otto Pfenninger 
Born April 5, 1855 Died March 20, 1929 (aged 73)
Mitcham, Surrey, EnglandNationality Swiss Field Photography 
Three colour lantern slide of children playing on a Brighton beach 6 August 1906
Otto Pfenninger (5 April 1855 – 20 March 1929)[1] was a founding member of the Swiss Photographers Association (1886) and a pioneer of colour photography. He moved to Brighton, England where he developed his career as a photographer.
In 1906, Pfenninger built a special camera to his own design using 3-colour separated plates from which full-colour photographic images could be created. That summer Pfenninger used this tri-colour, single exposure camera to create some of the first colour photographs, using the parks and beaches of Brighton as scenes.[2][3] His camera was based upon J.W. Bennetto's one-shot camera of 1897 in which three separation negatives were obtained at a single exposure. Pfenninger tried to use the same system but found that the refracted image was shorter from to to bottom,[4] his solution was to add a glass plate at the same angle, but opposite direction, to the Bennetto reflector.
In 1921,[5] under the pseudonym O. Reg, he wrote Byepaths of Colour Photography in which he discusses in technical detail, the history and theory of developments in subtractive colour photography.
References
- ^ GRO Croydon Vol. 2a Page 912
- ^ Sussex PhotoHistory, accessed 11 August 2011
- ^ Science & Society Picture library, accessed 21 August 2011
- ^ Brighton and Hove Natural History and Philosophical Society, Abstracts of Papers, Pfenninger lecture 6 December 1907, accessed 17 September 2011
- ^ E.P. Dutton & Co., New York. The book bears no publication date and other sources state 1924
External links
- Byepaths of Colour Photography, available online
Categories:- 1855 births
- 19th-century photographers
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