[bside123]

Here's is a very remarkable set of photographs mostly taken from 1909-1910. The simple subjects and primitive color processing is mesmerizing, and it really has you feel that you glimpsed the past. Enjoy!

Quoted from "The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs" at Boston.com:

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948. (34 photos total)

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

[rodge827]

Amazing!
My Grandmother was born in the Ukraine in 1910, and her family came over in 1911.
To see color photos, from that era so well done, is a treat in itself.
Every photo that I have ever seen from that time was in black and white.
Capturing the colors in the clothing and buildings, to me, brings that period better into focus.
So cool!