Amazing..that's it.

These photos were shot between 1863 and 1944 and were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii during a photographic survey of the Russian Empire. "He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color image". I can't actually believe some of them were taken over 100 year ago. The vibrancy of the fabric is just amazing, it is so rare to have any examples of colour of that period in time except in paintings.


http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html