A Gift for my Friends

[eyeharvester]

Given that at least one of my readers is a die-hard Russophile, it seems to me that I would be terribly remiss if I didn't post on my Journal a link to this website, a Library of Congress online exhibition of photographs from Tsarist-era Russia. Which wouldn't by itself be terribly interesting, except that these images are in color. Yes, that's right, decades before real color photography was invented, this Russian Royalist photographer (Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii) had developed a primitive way of creating color images using different lens filters, and modern digital technology has allowed scholars to enhance them so that they really look like damn good color images. So here we have images, real color true-to-life photographic images, of that distant past before the invention of color photography. It's pretty cool.

Being pretty cool since 1986,
--mark