Otto Pfenninger (5 April 1855 – 20 March 1929) was a founding member of the Swiss Photographers Association (1886) and a pioneer of
colour photography
Color photography is photography that uses media capable of capturing and reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white or gray- monochrome photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of ...
. He moved to
Brighton,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
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. 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 top to bottom, his solution was to add a glass plate at the same angle, but opposite direction, to the Bennetto reflector.
In 1921,
[E.P. Dutton & Co., New York. The book bears no publication date and other sources state 1924] 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
External links
''Byepaths of Colour Photography'' available online
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pfenninger, Otto
1855 births
19th-century Swiss photographers
1929 deaths