Photography being my first love, I’m always looking for interesting bits like these. One of my favorite collections is from 1950-1915 in Czarist Russia.
We tend to think of color photography in the same timeline as color television, but it ain’t so. The first color photographic prints were actually produced in 1857 by James Clerk Maxwell. While these photos by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii came along many years later, they were still done using approximately the same process Maxwell used decades earlier.
Color [I]film[/I] wasn’t invented until later than that however. The first color photographs were produced by projecting multiple negatives, each shot with a different filter, onto the photo paper simultaneously. (This explains the “ghosting” of the edges in some of Prokudin-Gorskii’s images.)
All I can say is I’d hate to be the one to dust that huge table and chair in England!
And if you’d like some soothing music to go with your picture viewing, check out The Piano Guys on YouTube (and when you’re not looking at still pictures, watch their amazing videos).