A Pioneer of Color Photography

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Rusia in 1863. In the year 1910, he had already invented a process for making color photographies. The process consisted in using a camera that taked quickly 3 sequential photos. The result where 3 images that combined provided a result that was slightly "ghostly", given that the photos where not taken simultaneously.

The inventor could transfer these results to paper, but that was a very slow and costly process. For this reason, the result was usually kept as three glass plates that could be seen with a special projector. This inspired Prokudin-Gorsky to begin the project that would make him famous: document the people and landscapes of Russia to generate material that could be used in schools for teaching.

An important collection of these photographies can be seen on-line thanks to the Library of the US Congress. I recommend the part of people at work that takes us, in full color, to the occupations of a very distant time.

Sources: Library of Congres (USA), Wikipedia