early Russia 1900s color photos

[ampguy]

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/10/21/color-photography-from-russian-in-the-early-1900s/

amazing!

 

[wjlapier]

I love looking at old photos and imagining what it would be like to either take the photo, or what it was like to live back in those days.

Thanx--

 

[Pickett Wilson]

I love to see color photos from the past. Shows the world wasn't actually all gray and grainy like most photos, being B&W, from the time make everyone think. These are amazing.

 

[Tom A]

Incredibly good colors! I can just imagine the speed of that plate/film. probably in the 1 iso range.

 

[FA Limited]

nice find, i'd be pretty happy w/ colors like that out of my equipment today

 

[Borghesia]

I've never seen such quality 100 y/o pictures, thanks for the link.

 

[degruyl]

I really like the inside shots of the industrial scenes.

Thanks for this.

I am really impressed that he got some of these people to stay still for three (long) shots. Really impressed.

 

[dexdog]

there have been threads on RFF in the past about this collection. Cool stuff, and the 3 or 4 plate process needed to make the images is interesting, too.

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79580

 

[Denis M.]

This was done with black and white film

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

"A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter. "

It's pretty interesting, I'm curious of trying some "color" tri-x shots

 

[ampguy]

looking again at the photos in the first link above, I can't help but think that some of them may have been "sharpened" in photoshop for the web blog.

Another reason why photoshop should be banned 😀

 

[degruyl]

looking again at the photos in the first link above, I can't help but think that some of them may have been "sharpened" in photoshop for the web blog.

Another reason why photoshop should be banned 😀

They would almost have to be:

1. they were probably reduced
2. There was some mention of color adjustment on the linked info page
3. They are scanned images of 100 year old negatives, you would think they might need some tweaking for visualization purposes.
4. Scanners tend to do that sort of thing as well. As do people doing scanning.

 

[degruyl]

This was done with black and white film

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

"A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter. "

It's pretty interesting, I'm curious of trying some "color" tri-x shots

Don't bother with anything that moves...

It seems that these were taken with a single three lens camera. Not the "rapid sequence" but all "at once". or as close as possible.

I do not believe the first representation on the about page. The projector shown below is more likely to be the same as the camera.

I think the three lenses were set to meet at a certain point (say 10-15 feet in front of the camera) where the photographer placed his victims. This explains why parallax errors in terms of colors are so much less in the portraits than in the rest of the frame.

My two cents...

I love the water effects, though.

 

[urban_alchemist]

Oh my god! Fascinating! It's so interesting to see the world on the cusp of rapid industrialisation and true globalisation: within decades, these ways-of-life (hundreds of years old) would be gone forever...

And it's not that long ago...