Thanks for posting!

1863 is 15 years before the famous galloping horse film was made... and that took 24 different cameras to shoot. This alleged Civil War film is clearly from a stationary location. At least one person in that crowd seems to be wearing a 1910s era hat.

I'm willing to bet the clip of the Confederate soldiers is from D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915).

the early 1870s: at that time, fraction of a second exposures first become possible then

I think your link may be hoax based on this: the gap in the trees up the road is remarkably similar

The man with the red shirt and the women in the straw hat at the end of the re-enactment are in both clips; the tents are in the same location, etc...

seems to be French for "hoax"

Sorry about messing with your thread.

of the constant marching and low rations. Especially the Confederates.

considering how old they are.

My family has this photo of an ancestor who died in 1847 - we think it was taken in Belfast but I don't have much other information.

But I'll always hear it as the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus.

completely different:

That music didn't fit and you can read the screen description anyway.

Monty Python was that old!

I didn't know they could do color so early.

... The first color photograph made according to Maxwell's prescription, a set of three monochrome "color separations", was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for use in illustrating a lecture on color by Maxwell, where it was shown in color by the triple projection method. The test subject was a bow made of ribbon with stripes of various colors, apparently including red and green. During the lecture, which was about physics and physiology, not photography, Maxwell commented on the inadequacy of the results and the need for a photographic material more sensitive to red and green light. A century later, historians were mystified by the reproduction of any red at all, because the photographic process used by Sutton was for all practical purposes totally insensitive to red light and only marginally sensitive to green. In 1961, researchers found that many red dyes also reflect ultraviolet light, coincidentally transmitted by Sutton’s red filter, and surmised that the three images were probably due to ultra-violet, blue-green and blue wavelengths, rather than to red, green and blue ...

You can see it in post cards as well and the colors were almost cartoon like due to the limits of printing.

in the early nineteenth century, and once the halftone process was invented for reproducing photographs, it would be natural to try to combine the two: one could clearly use Maxwell's technique of taking three snapshots through three different filters and could use the snapshots to produce three different halftone plates for the three colors inks -- and most of the mechanical reproduction work, though novel in combination at first, would have been close to routine work for any printing house that had already mastered the separate steps halftone and chromolithography


An Early Indian Book with Color Photographs <1897>
... The fact that the second edition came out less than three months after the first suggests quick turn-around ...
http://www.photoraj.com/blog/early-indian-books-color-photographs

Early tricolor halftone prints may seem to have cartoonish colors because the photographic work involves additive color theory, whereas the printing involves subtractive theory -- and thus one faces the somewhat nontrivial problem of finding ink colors that are appropriate to the photographic filter colors:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_photography

But I expect you're right about colorizing: it must have been straightforward for professionals to make three appropriate color plates, from a black and white photograph, to mass produce the colorized picture, as in this postcard

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohiouniversitylibraries/3528770121/

I am fascinated by early photos and methods...

Thank you.

i started collecting old photographs after buying an old photo album at a antique shop for $5. the album was soooooooooooooooooo cool as it was 'scrapbooked'. no I.D. unfortunately. i buy albums when i can and photos when i find them. even very poor photos can be brought back from nothing w/ photshopping. one phot was so washed out, and just a little darkening and it's a meal on a large porch! sadly i do not have access, but i have seen a few photos my great-great uncle took, WHO i knew til my 30's. he had a good eye.

The picture ID'd as Wm. Henry Harrison was actually John Quincy Adams.

This is the picture they identify as Harrison



And this is the picture they identify as Adams

Thank you for posting.

An actual photograph of someone who fought with George Washington.