When you think about World War I-era photographs, you think of black-and-white shots, right? I was surprised recently to learn that a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii had developed a pretty ingenious method for color photography shortly before WWI that involved taking three black-and-white photos of the same scene, one through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter and then using a special projector, combining the images, which resulted in a remarkably realistic color image.
Read more about it at The Russian Record and see many of his works, works which manage to make places and people from many, many decades ago seem a lot more recent. Looking at an old black-and-white photo always makes the scene feel like long, long ago, very far removed from where you are today. But then you come across a shot like this that feels like it could have been taken yesterday.
Neat stuff. I’d like to see someone use this method today… or maybe just figure out how to take a “regular” color photo and recreate the effect in Photoshop (I’m aware of being able to split colors and such, but I don’t believe that it would result in quite the same “feel”).
Posted in Technology