Russia in colour a century ago.

They're all 'shops' I can tell from the pixels :p

Only joking, stunning imagery. The fact they so vividly capture a time just before Europe was about to tear itself apart in flames and then the Russians themselves; and the whole direction of European politics would change unalterably.

I wonder how many of those people were even alive 5 or 10 years later, they would have to have survived The Great War, The Russian Revolution and the great Influenza pandemic of 1918 :eek: crazy times.
 
Love photographs like these. As has been said it makes you wonder what people will make of our videos/images in 100 years time. (If they have a way to view them)
 
Cheerful bunch those Russians aren't they :p

It's only in the period around the early 1900s that it became fashionable to smile in photographs, look at a lot of British ones in the same time frame, particularly working class images as the fashion took longer to filter from the middle class richer europeans outwards and downwards.
 
Good photos- the image quality is remarkable for the time.

That's because they were created and 'touched up' in the last decade, the originals wouldn't have been as good as those....

Due to the difficulty in reproducing prints of sufficient quality from the negatives, only some hundred were used for exhibits, books and scholarly articles after the Library of Congress acquired them.[4] The best-known is perhaps the 1980 coffee table book Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II,[19] where the photos were combined from black-and-white prints of the negatives.[20] It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one.[21] The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into color images.[22] He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct.[23] In 2001, the Library of Congress produced an exhibition from these, The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.[24] The photographs have since been the subject of many other exhibitions in the area where Prokudin-Gorsky took his photos.[25][26][27][28][29][30]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky
 
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