Amazing Tsarist Era COLOR photos!

[badgerW]

So the story is, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was hired by Tsar Nicholas II to be the official photographer. He came up with a way of creating color photos by using red, green, and blue filters and making 3 B&W exposures, and projecting them through a special projector to create a color image. Really cool stuff. Anyway, the US Library of Congress ended up with his plates. They spent a lot of time digitizing them and cleaning them up, and now they're available here:

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

They look amazing for photos taken before 1920! There are high-res TIFF versions of all the exhibited photos if you click the "Search the Collection" link. There are over 2600 photos available! Examples below:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-6040.jpg

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-8086.jpg

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-8001.jpg

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87_8019a__01762_.jpg

[S.Horton]

Cool!

I never knew anything about that.

[Radtech1]

Cool!

I never knew anything about that.

Yes, it's very cool. I originally posted this info back in 2006 HERE (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=179309), but since your sign up date was 6 months AFTER my post, it's OK that you didn't know about it.

Always worth bringing to a new set of eyes.

(Oh, Badger, in the strictest sense, you really shouldn't post photos that you didn't take yourself.)

Rad

[S.Horton]

^^ I think those photos are fair game for display, given their ownership and attribution, but I'm willing to be wrong.