gwax's rumblings

Way back in nineteen-aught-nine (1909) – ah those were the good old days – a Russian man by the name of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii devel­oped a tech­nique for tak­ing color pho­tographs with black and white film. The tech­nique, which you can read more about at Damn Interesting involved tak­ing three dif­fer­ent pho­tos using three dif­fer­ent color fil­ters; it’s a pretty clever tech­nique and was pretty rev­o­lu­tion­ary for the time. Tzar Nicky (Nicholas II) liked the color pho­tos and when Sergei pro­posed doc­u­ment­ing the Russian Empire in color pho­tos, Nicky hopped right on board with finan­cial sup­port. In 1948, the US LOC bought all of Sergei’s neg­a­tives from his heirs and in 1998 they used fancy dig­i­tal imag­ing tech­niques to recom­pose the color images in fan­tas­ti­cally high qual­ity. The LOC has put a num­ber of these restored images in an online gallery and more can be found at the Russian Record. Ah, good ol’ Mother Russia, she sure did some keen stuff back in the day (he he, Sputnik).

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 10:59 pm and is filed under art & culture, keen, science & technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.