Damn Interesting » Color Photos From the World War I Era
Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of his homeland and captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them to produce accurate color images.
He accomplished this with a clever camera of his own design, which took three black and white photos of a scene in rapid sequence, each though a differently colored filter. His photographic plates were long and slender, capturing all three images onto the same plate, resulting in three monochrome images which each had certain color information filtered out.
Sergei was then able to use a special image projector to project the three images onto a screen, each directly overlapping the others, and each through the appropriately colored filter. The recombined projection was a full-color representation of the original scene. Emir of BukharaEach three-image series captured by the camera stored all of the color information onto the black and white plates; all they lacked was actual tint, which the color filters on the projector restored.
You have to look this over and then click on to view the exhibit that the Library of Congress has put up. The process, the pictures, it’s all amazing.
Tags: History, Interesting, Photographs, Photography
The color photos from so long ago are amazing. I could literally smell the grass and woods in the photos. It’s a shame that so many of the amazing things from the Soviet Union/Russia were kept from the American public for years because of our self imposed censorship of all thing Russian.
What’s sadder what the communists did to a lot of these wonerful things over the years of their rule. They made a wasteland, what was once a huge vibrant nation.