Russia In Color, A Century Ago (pics)

Hi ATS.

Thought this was cool for sharing.

Just happened to stumble across this.

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.

These are indeed some stunning pictures.

Shared a couple of my favorites.

There are more at the link.

An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), circa 1910.

Self-portrait on the Karolitskhali River, ca. 1910. Prokudin-Gorskii in suit and hat, seated on rock beside the Karolitskhali River, in the Caucasus Mountains near the seaport of Batumi on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.

A woman is seated in a calm spot on the Sim River, part of the Volga watershed in 1910.

A switch operator poses on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River in 1910.

General view of the wharf at Mezhevaya Utka, 1912.

A metal truss bridge on stone piers, part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, crossing the Kama River near Perm, Ural Mountains Region, ca. 1910

Lots and lots of cool pictures, picked a couple for displaying purposes.

rest can be found here, 34 in total

Enjoy.

These old photos are fascinating. Thank you

Yes some very good photos of an era now long gone.
Thanks for sharing them with us.

Thank you for sharing!! Viewing pictures like these of a time long past makes you think of ones life now and how we have evolved, and not always for the better.

These are stunning photos. They look as though they were taken today. I'm sure they've been cleaned up a bit. But the quality had to be there to start with to get those kinds of results. Thanks for look back in time. S&F.

Thank you for posting this thread! This is more of the type of thread that I look forward to seeing everyday, instead of the threads that I'm sure we could all do without wasting time looking at.

For his time, that photographer was a genius! I agree with the other person who said that the color rivals the color of photos taken with today's tech. It even looks better than the movies that had just started to use color! Imagine how photography could have improved over the years in the public market if these ideas were shared back then? Even the technology we have today probably would have been better with ideas like that being shared that early on.

S+F to this thread!!!!

i seen these yesterday , very interesting indeed , kind of makes you wonder how life was lived back then , hard work just to eat ,