In Revolutionary Color

[MIJ-VI]

In Revolutionary Color
"Russian photos taken 100 years ago look as if they were taken yesterday."



Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii.
Steam Engine Kompaund with a
Shmidt Super-heater, 1910.
Digital color rendering.
Prints and Photographs Division
(LC-DIG-ppmsc-04424) (20)

[Metalbasshippy]

What?!?!? That's crazy
Those are incredible are you sure they aren't a hoax?

[()smoke()]

wow, the first photo is great...just can't get the others to load on my phone, but plan to look at a computer later for sure

[MIJ-VI]

Originally Posted by Metalbasshippy

What?!?!? That's crazy
Those are incredible are you sure they aren't a hoax?

Dunno. But it's www.newsweek.com

EDIT:

These beautiful colour photos were shot by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

Documentary of the Russian Empire

Around 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire.[14]

Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire's bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population.

It has been estimated from Prokudin-Gorsky's personal inventory that before leaving Russia, he had about 3500 negatives.[15] Upon leaving the country and exporting all his photographic material, about half of the photos were confiscated by Russian authorities for containing material that was strategically sensitive for war-time Russia.[4] According to Prokudin-Gorsky's notes, the photos left behind were not of interest to the general public.[15] Some of Prokudin-Gorsky's negatives were given away,[16] and some he hid on his departure.[17] Outside the Library of Congress collection, none has yet been found.[15]

By Prokudin-Gorsky's death, the tsar and his family had long since been executed during the Russian Revolution, and Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. The surviving boxes of photo albums and fragile glass plates the negatives were recorded on were finally stored in the basement of a Parisian apartment building, and the family was worried about them getting damaged. The United States Library of Congress purchased the material from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs in 1948 for $3500–$5000 on the initiative of a researcher inquiring into their whereabouts.[15] The library counted 1902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives in the collection.[18]

Due to the difficulty in reproducing prints of sufficient quality from the negatives, only some hundred were used for exhibits, books and scholarly articles after the Library of Congress acquired them.[4] The best-known is perhaps the 1980 coffee table book Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II,[19] where the photos were combined from black-and-white prints of the negatives.[20] It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one.[21] The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into color images.[22] He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct.[23] In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition from these, The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.[24] The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Prokudin-Gorsky took his photos.[25][26][27][28][29][30]

In 2004, the Library of Congress contracted with computer scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas to produce an automated color composite of each of the 1902 negatives from the high-resolution digital images of the glass-plate negatives. He applied algorithms to compensate for the differences between the exposures and prepared color composites of all the negatives in the collection.[12] As the library offers the high-resolution images of the negatives freely on the Internet, many others have since created their own color representations of the photos,[31] and they have become a favourite testbed for computer scientists.[32] A century after Prokudin-Gorsky explained his ambitions to the tsar, people all around the world are finally able to view his work, fulfilling his goal of showing everyone the glory of the Russian Empire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_...Russian_Empire

[sandmangeck]

They've done plenty others like that. WW2 stuff, etc. It's pretty awesome

[Atoz]

I really enjoy looking at old photos like this. Thanks for posting.

BTW - here's a link to another site dedicated to Prokudin-Gorskii's photography:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

[Deluge Of Sound]

Color Tolstoy!

[Hawaii Islander]

Thanks for sharing the link to those photos. Interesting look into the past.

[MIJ-VI]

Originally Posted by Atoz

I really enjoy looking at old photos like this. Thanks for posting.

BTW - here's a link to another site dedicated to Prokudin-Gorskii's photography:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

Excellent! Now we get to learn how he did color shots.

And why:

...Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire...

[MJ5150]

I'd totally rock that robe the Emir is wearing.

-Mike

[Atoz]

This thread is too cool to slip away so quickly.

[Joe Gress]

Awesome photos indeed! The quality and vividness of them are incredible.