Old Photos, High Tech

Newsweek has a photo presentation from the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. The photos were taken between 1907 and 1915.

"So what?" you might ask. You've seen old photos before.

Here's the difference: These photos are in color. That's right, color, long before Kodachrome came to be. Prokudin-Gorskii shot three images of a scene, each exposure taken with a different filter. He then projected the three images to produce the color scene.

The Library of Congress purchased the glass plates after Prokudin-Gorskii's death in 1944, and, with the help of digital tech, has recently restored them. You can see them here.