Vintage photos of "The Empire That Was Russia"

Vintage photos of "The Empire That Was Russia": "


Vann Hall says:

Yesterday's Boing Boing entry on panoramic photos of power-plant control rooms reminded me of a Library of Congress site, 'The Empire That Was Russia,' showcasing the color(!) photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, taken in the years immediately preceding WWI.

Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera of his own design that took three photographs in rapid succession on a 9x3' glass plate; the images were shot through a red, green, and blue filter, respectively. After developing, a full-color image could be projected from the plate using a custom, three-part projection system.

In 1948, the LoC bought the existing plates from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs -- seemingly including nearly 1,900 color images, along with an unknown number of black-and-white photos. They've since been digitized and made available on the LoC web site. Most are available in three variations -- composite color image, single-frame black-and-white image, and entire (three-frame) negative -- and, amazingly, each variant is available as a medium- or high-resolution JPEG ('high-resolution' in this case reflecting typical usage at the time the scan was made: namely 1024 x 826 or thereabouts) or an uncompressed archival TIFF (e.g. 3200 x 2700 pixel for composite image). In addition, selected images are also presented in a 'corrected' format that takes into account problems with plate shrinkage and misregistration.

The subject matter varies widely, as Prokudin-Gorskii's intent had been systematically to document the Russian Empire...

The Empire That Was Russia (Thanks, Vann!)




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