damninteresting.com — Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them to produce accurate color images
Dec 9, 2005 View in Crawl 4
kasheyDec 9, 2005
Old but good. There was a site where all those photos are in original format. And if you like you could try to match them yourself.
massifDec 9, 2005
Check out the ethnic diversity section and the picture of prisoners in Zindan. The crouching guy's face is just plain scary.
Closed AccountDec 9, 2005
Wow, I knew that in the they had some in Switzerland in the 20's, for medical research.Hey! Do the poll to say what bookmark manager you prefer:<a class="user" href="http://quimble.com/poll/view_poll/224">http://quimble.com/poll/view_poll/224</a>
sumoraiDec 9, 2005
To those who mentioned this was covered on slashdot years ago, you're right. I remember reading it there too. Except it was more than one or two years ago, it was FOUR years ago. Heh.<a class="user" href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/06/2135224&tid=152">http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/06/2135224&tid=152</a>
jawsDec 9, 2005
great digg!
wazzaDec 9, 2005
Just a second... <a class="user" href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-8003.jpg">http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87-8003.jpg</a>I've seen him somewhere before :-)
rollingrock60Dec 9, 2005
that is unbelievable. Great Digg!!!!!!!!
militaryaceDec 9, 2005
cool, great digg!!!
jetfireDec 9, 2005
Thought this was already Dugged. Read about it about a week ago or maybe read it on a different tech site. It is interesting though
knightmareDec 9, 2005
i bet there are forged....prob falsy colored with the app that was posted on digg a few days ago...the color of their skin looks that way
zonk3rDec 10, 2005
btw, the first commercially successful color film system, technicolor, used a similar system. they used a single main lens, a prism beam splitter and finally color filters to split the light out into primaries. then they recorded each "color" onto different pieces of b&w film. as you might imagine the cameras were enormous and very complex (especially in later systems in the 30's when they devised better color reproduction). when the movie was "printed" they took each color strip of film and literally printed the colors onto each frame one color at a time with a dye. because of the type of dyes and film used during the early days of technicolor these films happen to be in amazing shape (the stock itself and the color correctness) and haven't turned to liquid as many newer acetate and nitrate based films...here's a link to some info:<a class="user" href="http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor1.htm">http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor1.htm</a>here's a pic of one of the later, better, but bigger cameras:<a class="user" href="http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor_giants_in_england.jpg">http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor_giants_in_england.jpg</a>
korvarasJan 10, 2006
Wow. Those are incredible. You know, with all the black and white shots of the World Wars, you never really thought of the world in colour during those times. To see the world in colour from that era is absolutely incredible.
djsdjsOct 6, 2006
OK, I'm a million minutes late on commenting on this thread, but I couldn't help but mention that this is EXACTLY how digital cameras capture color information.In photoshop the "Channels" tab seperates you color into (SURPRISE) 3 grey scale layers. Each layer tracks the "Amount" of that color that should be applied to the composite view. "Filters" on the CMOS chip determine what color a given pixel captures.It is not possible to know exactly how these would have looked in the old projection system, but they would look more like photos viewed on a computer than prints because with both projection and computers the "picture" is emitting light, rather than having it bounce off printed colors (which is also why slides generally look so much better than prints)