100 Year Old Colour Photos From Russia

Between 1909 and 1912, 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.

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

taken 1910

taken 1910

taken 1909

taken 1910

There are many more on the site

looks like they have been taken yesterday

  Quote

looks like they have been taken yesterday

That's what makes them so weird to me. After a while you sort of internalize this image of everything from 100+ years ago being b/w & grainy.

wonderful!

amazing indeed!

this is fucking awesome. a wet dream for me!

Whoa... that's one of the most impressive things I've seen in a while.

what i find amazing is that my recent olympus camera takes way worst pictures than this 100 year old one.

This is really hard for my brain to comprehend. I am in love.

you gotta be shittin me

and ruiagnelo, i was just thinking the same thing. these pics are way better than any camera i've ever used

the landscapes look great. I wonder how long the exposure times were.

this is amazing indeed

it makes the past seem much more real suddenly

Surprised no one has said

S'cool though.

fuck off you cunt.

this reminds me of that thread from a couple of years ago

spot the ghost ^^^

http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2007/01/25/russian-people-100-years-ago-in-color/

how they can have colors in 100 years ago??

This one's also interesting, if you look at the water, it has that same effect which HDR photos also have. That's because HDR is also achieved by putting multiple pics together, if I'm not mistaken. The water is "blurry" because of the slight time differences in the pictures.

i wonder how big the computer they uploaded these pics into was!

i so created this thread like two years ago. jazz. but still, prokudin-gorsky is brilliant and thank god for the gigantic inflated ego of pre-revolution russia.

he apparently took like three different exposures, one in red, one in green and one in blue, or summat. so sometimes people are ghosts.

regards what people be saying about the quality, has anyone seen the pics of Endurance from Shackleton's expedition? roughly same time (i think?), they're black and white but look fantastic. apparently it's because the film plates were so big then - they weren't done on what we'd call regular size film so they didn't have to be blown up or something. this may be the same.

still, they're fucking cool

edited cuz i put the wrong boat name.

fake

This is new to me and I'm loving in.

It's funny how in all old photos no-one ever wants to smile. It can't have been all that bad can it?

Surely these people didn't have on their minds all what seems to consume our lives today?

  On 9/25/2010 at 3:57 AM, nene multiple assgasms said:

the landscapes look great. I wonder how long the exposure times were.

probably rather short, the only things that are "ghostly" are fast moving things like the reflections in the water, and that is probably only due to the time between the different pictures being taken.

  On 9/25/2010 at 4:27 AM, sup said:

how they can have colors in 100 years ago??

Three different pictures were taken. I think through a filter of sorts, to only let specific kinds of light through. Kind of like when using 3D glasses. Then he must have had a way to bring them together, "calculate" the colors the way they looked and combine them in one picture using some chemicals or whatever.

  On 9/25/2010 at 9:23 AM, spratters said:

This is new to me and I'm loving in.

 

It's funny how in all old photos no-one ever wants to smile. It can't have been all that bad can it?

 

Surely these people didn't have on their minds all what seems to consume our lives today?

A bit of starvation here, a little plague there - not so bad

Nah but I guess the whole "smile for the camera" is a more recent thing. Could be social changes too, maybe they thought they would look silly or vulnerable when they smile on a photograph. Also I imagine it took quite a while for these pictures to be taken, preparation, tripod, people would probably be curious at first and then quickly get bored once the photographer would take a couple of minutes putting it all together. And then it's harder to remain still while smiling for cameras with long exposure time. As for why the kids don't seem to smile either - they were probably told to have a serious face and not joke around.