Colour photos of Russia from before the revolution
 

I found this web site,
http://www.gridenko.com/pg1/
Which has an amazing selection of colour photos of the Russian Empire from before 1915. Note, these are not colourised black and white images, but real colour plates taken using a 3 plate Red-Green-Blue combination technique.

It surprised me how modern some of these scenes look. It makes you realise the world was not B&W then, and granny's dress was not really sepia coloured.
I did particularly like plate 01748 on page 2. Some commercial enterprises have been going on for a lot longer than you think, he no doubt did a brisk trade on a Friday night!

Duncan

What a fantastic set of photographs. And what a photographer: it's possible to learn a lot just looking at his images. Many thanks for the link.

Absolutely stunning.

My favorite is 01497 on page 2, but it's a tough choice. There are so many superb images.

Duncan, thanks for posting it to the forum.

Bruce C

Absolutely fascinating. The redhead on page one is a perfect specimen of his work and technique.

hi

colour photos and colour newsreels always shrink history for me as opposed to B&W, if that makes sense.
Chris

Breath taking.

I solute you Duncan for this link.

Amazing how they could achieve this degree of sophistication in color and art of photography with those primitive tools. Aren't we happy we are living in the digital photography area? I can not imagine non-digital photography, that too without access to photoshop........

Ansel Adams are borned without borders. I say lets get out and bring out the Ansel Adams inside you.

Side Note: Duncan I vividly remember rectangular, long barbecues with hand fan made up of bamboos leaf as shown on image you referred as your favorite one, back in my childhood in Tehran. Usually the delicacy was sheep's liver, cut on Long but quit narrow pieces kept on a short and tiny metallic stick as the one guy is handling and he would handle some 20 of these sticks at a time to turn over or run the show. Other delicacy included kidney and heart and rarely some white cubical pieces that I was told by grandma are testicle but she never explained to me right, why they should be eaten on especial occasions only and are not good for children... Well you may say Yakkkkk but I still remember that excellent taste of food served with local bread and basal and mint. May be their secret was to give a small portion of food at a time, just to stimulate the taste bud but keep stomach empty so that the enthusiastic costumers would come back again.

Thanks duncun for the link,It is absolutely amazing, Here the word fails to tell about the pictures. He is a genius sort of

Thank you for sharing this superb find Duncan. Both the quality and content of these restored plates is truly amazing. I have heard of early music performances on record being restored almost note by note by a keen digitalist; this does the same for the photos. However the name of Prokudin-Gorskii deserves to be better known as a genius of photography as the basic content must have been there from the start. When one looks out those ghastly 70s colour prints and tries to get a decent pic back out....

Also just the job for rainy days when WPF isn't coming up with its normal standard, can he be made an honorary member? I am sure you could post some with current date and no-one would guess the exif data. 00458 could easily be taken at a railway museum yesterday.