Peasants of the Russian Empire, 1909-1915. These are NOT colorized. They were taken using a special three-color filter technique over 100 years ago.

    by Due_Highway_8509

    20 Comments

    1. Due_Highway_8509 on

      For those wondering how this quality is possible: These photos were taken by **Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky**. He was a pioneer who convinced the Tsar to let him document the Russian Empire.

      He used a camera that took three rapid black-and-white exposures through red, green, and blue filters. When projected together, they created a full-color image. This was decades before color film became standard. Looking at these feels like looking through a time portal especially knowing that the world depicted here would completely vanish just a few years later due to WWI and the Revolution.

    2. Confident-Job-137 on

      it’s so surreal seeing the trees and nature from 110+ years ago looking just like they do rn

    3. I did my high school photography paper on him. Fascinating stuff. The three black and white photos, taken with colored filters, would then be displayed through colored filtered lenses and “colorizing” the image, or with a special viewing scope, that contained all three colored filters you could look through and see the “colored” image on a print. It’s wild stuff.

      Lifted straight from wiki, which explains it better than I can.

      The resulting three photographs could be projected through filters of the same colors and exactly superimposed on a screen, synthesizing the original range of color additively; or viewed as an additive color image by one person at a time through an optical device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope, which contained colored filters and transparent reflectors that visually combined the three into one full-color image; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow, which, when superimposed, reconstituted the color subtractively.

    4. My grandfather wrote a journal about growing up a peasant in rural Russia in the early 1900s. Lunch was what you found growing or crawling.

      They eventually fled because of the pogroms by the Cossacks. They almost settled in Warsaw but were lucky enough to make it to NY.

    5. Marty Lagina from Oak Island was there? The dude must have found the treasure and used it to build a time machine.

    6. LupusDeusMagnus on

      The fourth one, the dude is looking at Artur Morgenov or Ivan Bolotov ready to give a quest.

    7. Content_Relative_581 on

      That purple dress pops like it was taken yesterday. Mind blown this is over 100 years old.

    8. Due-Pirate-6711 on

      Does anyone know what that massive wicker basket in #4 is used for? I’m impressed by the size and craftsmanship involved.

    9. anyone want to weigh in on the significance/meaning of posing with a plate of food?

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