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| Rosa Maiden's Blush' 11 June 2024 |
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| From Peter Beales - Classic Roses - 1997 |
Few in this century know that Kodachrome, introduced in 1935 was calibrated by placing a white man at noon, midsummer in Washington, DC. A few might know that as you move to extreme north or south where there is snow it will look blue. And that Kodachrome had it been exposed in Mexico or closer to the Equator the colours would have been warmer. A fact is that digital cameras in this century are calibrated to the Kodachrome standard.
As a portrait photographer I have always been concerned in showing my colour portraits in which my subject’s skin is as accurate as possible. In that last century that was virtually impossible. Films like Ektachrome added bluish cast. Red-haired people where the most difficult as it was impossible (yes!) to get both the colour of their hair and that luminous colour of their skin. Only in this century was I finally able to correct the skin of this lovely woman from that other century.
In this century there has been a vast improvement in skin colour accuracy.
But if you look into this blog I wrote about Trump (below) you will see that while the possibility is there many photographers either ignore the possibility or have no idea.
All the above is to introduce how one of my favourite roses, Rosa ‘Maiden’s Blush’ has a connection with my topic of skin colour.
It is one of the roses with the most variant names. Could it be that even in those many years ago there was still a disagreement on skin colour? Add to that now we are really aware of the skin colour of all the peoples in our planet. In the late 80s Kodak sold in Vancouver a colour negative that was balanced for people in India. Many local photographers used it for weddings when their subjects were of some different ethnic origin.
Kodak also introduced in the 80s film that made people look sun-tanned. In those days a sun tan was seen as healthy. No more. Some photographers (me) like to photograph people who avoid sun tans.
One of my subjects, my Ukranian friend Olena avoids sun and has the whitest skin I have ever seen in these parts. When I photographed her in my Kitsilano piano room, I made sure to calibrate my camera’s colour temperature (that is a complex concept that can be seen in this blog below) so that I could get her white skin in a room where sunlight was filtering through the Venetian blinds.
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| Olena in the piano room |
Scriabin, colour temperature & Kodachrome
