Color Russian Photos from a Century Ago

I was looking through these yesterday, they certainly are amazing. It is so hard imagining that these were taken a century ago.
 
Thanks! The photos are fascinating. It would be interesting to see comparison photos of some of these communities now.
 
very interesting and intriguing set! that film must have been so slow! in the self portrait in direct sunlight the water in the stream is so soft. And the different colours have different ISO speeds too - that gives a very strange effect with those red ghosts on some of the pics. a fantastic archive :)
 
Amazing photos…they look better than most colour photos I make today with all the technology we have.

Nathan — I thought the colour ghosting was due to improper alignment of plates and general lens aberrations/distortion.
 
The pictures were done on glass plates (black and white) and digitally colored. There is more about the pictures and how they were colored on a link to the Library of Congress where the pictures are kept. I just dug a little deeper to find out how they were made. But still wonderful pictures.

Mike
 
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Here's a rundown on how the vintage BW negs were shot and how they were digitized and combined to create the modern digital color images. Each photo was shot as three 3x3" images on one 3x9" glass plate!

I suppose this old three-negative color technology would work just as well today. Combining the images digitally certainly would make things easy compared to using magic lanterns, and WAY easier than the gyrations they used with this basic approach to create Technicolor movies.

Anyone tried it?
 
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I see, i saw how in images 19 and 27 the only colour separation seems to be around what i took to be moving objects, such as the baby in number 27 and the boy's head and the arm of the chap in 19 and the guy in the background just to the right of centre, it seemed to suggest to me that some of the image had been captured in 1 colour, then the people had moved somewhat before the other colours had exposed. no wi understand that separate frames have been merged as a composite it all makes sense :)

i take it from the link that there were separate plates capturing different colour ranges that have been used to create a digital composite.

EDIT: thanks dbarned, i posted at the same time as you
 
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The picture of the boy by the fence gate shows the boys shadow and you can also see the shadow of the photographer; it's like seeing a ghost.

Mike
 
Amazing stuff for that time... Some of that same concept is still used in making dye-transfer prints, the first step of which is making three color-separation negatives on black & white film, one each through red blue or green color process filters.

Some of the color artifacts we see in these photos I think are due to physical damage and/or defects in the emulsions on the glass plates. But other color fringing and the colored ripples in the water are due to the sequential nature of the exposures. Anything that has moved between the exposures will be a little different on at least one of the three negs.

Years ago I did some experimental shots using color process filters to make three exposures on the same color neg, each exposure with a different color filter. The total exposure resulted in correct-color... except for things that had moved between exposures. I got that same color ripple effect on the water in a stream, and oddly colored rocks and leaves I'd taken away or added between shots.

I recognize the same effects in the Russian photos; some of the people didn't remain still during the three-exposure process, water rippled, grasses moved in the wind, etc.
 
what a visionaire was behind these photos, not just technical expert but by giving us this opportunity to see what he saw. and lucky incident they were saved from both world wars and Russian revolution.
 
This book is interesting:

"Colour Photography, The first hundred years 1840 - 1940" by Brian Coe, who is/was the curator of the Kodak Museum.

ISBN 0 904069 24 9 Published by Ash & Grant in 1978.

Regards, David
 
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