Color photos from the early 20th Century

For those that are interested, I found an amazing site. It is the work of the photographer to the Tsars of Russia, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. He perfected color photography buy using red, green, and blue filters.

The detail on the pictures is nothing short of incredible. Here's the link and a picture. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html
Enjoy.

That really is amazing. Thanks for posting this and the link.

I had no idea color photography existed so early. Thanks for posting.

Gorskii basically had a special camera that took three seperate black and white photos simultaneously, on three different rolls of film. One camera had a red lens, another a green lens, and another a blue.

When the images were shown through three projectors with matching lenses, a crude way to display color via black and white photography emerged. The colors were bad and they didn't look very realistic, but at the time it was an interesting advance (today we recognize it as a photographic dead end).

The photos on that site are actually computer recreations of the images based on Gorskii's original works. Since Gorskii's images gave us a way to get accurate color levels through each of the three images, we can today feed his image data into a computer and produce a reproduction far better than anything he could do. He didn't invent color photography, but he developed a great way to allow US a colorful view into his world.