lucis

In the early 1900s, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii conducted elaborate photographic surveys of the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas II. The thousands of pictures that he took of people, architecture, transportation, etc. are one of the best record of the Russian Empire before the Revolution. What really intrigued me about this is that all this work was done in color!

He developed a really ingenious technique of photography. Using three filters (red, green and blue), he took three pictures of a scene on ordinary ordinary black and white glass plate negatives. These pictures were then projected using the same filters to get a single color image. Very neat work!

The Library of Congress came to possess huge collection of these triple-negative plates and photographer Walter Frankhauser guided in cleaning and alignment of about 120 plates to get hi-res color pictures. Now it is possible to easily view these pictures the way they were meant to be seen - in full vibrant color! Make sure you check out the Library’s online exhibit, The Empire that was Russia. Do explore this site for a while - it is well worth the time!

The quality of this work is simply amazing, specially the color. Most digital cameras today come nowhere near the vivid color these images display. That brings us to, is Digital Photography correct today? This is one of my advisor’s favourite topics of discussion. I would not go into details here, but one thing that is obvious is that digital cameras should not try to mimic film cameras. Digital has far greater potential that film ever had, and a new way of thinking about Digital Photography is needed to make use of it.

Well, back to the topic, Frank Dellaert (at CMU, now at GaTech) made use of vision techniques for automatic alignment and colorization of the plates. Though his results are not as good as the 120 that were manually done, he has almost the entire slide collection colorized. Addison Godel has a decent gallery that he generated using Photoshop.

The picture on this page is �The Bukhara Emir�. Click on it for a bigger picture. Notice the vivid color in his dress.