I came across these blue flowers (weeds?) almost directly across the road from my house. Something about them reminded me of old autochrome images I had seen and loved in the Metropolitan Museum, NY.

According to the National Gallery of Art:

The Autochrome, a positive color transparency on glass, was invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1907 and manufactured by them until 1933. Autochromes were made by coating a glass plate with a sticky varnish and dusting it with a layer of randomly distributed, translucent potato-starch grains. These grains, which were dyed red-orange, violet, and green, were then interspersed with fine black carbon dust, and again varnished. The plates were next coated with a light-sensitive gelatin silver-bromide or silver-iodide emulsion. When the plate was inserted into a camera, the light from the lens passed through the dyed starch grains, which acted as color filters before reaching the emulsion. After exposure, the plate was processed to make a unique, full-color, positive silver image.

Autochromes have a hazy, ethereal-looking quality, like a painting that isn’t actually a painting that is (at least in my experience) impossible to duplicate in digital photography, although the picture above comes close.

Incidentally isn’t “Lumière”, the name of the creators of the process a wonderful name in this context. If you don’t understand French the word means “light”.

Taken with a Sony A77II and Minolta 50mm f2.8 Macro lens