Check out the pre-WWI color photography of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. The process by which he made and displayed the photos is quite ingenious.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/

So it was in 1903 that the world turned color, as per Calvin's dad?

I agree with you, Stephen, this does change your outlook on WWI. A color picuture is truly worth a thousand words.

Just awesome.

fantastic.
thanks a million.

many thanks Stephen and tbob (for the Russian Collection). Life really was in color back then. I should have believed my grandparents.

Thanks, Stephen! My grandfather fought in France.

tbob is correct, I have a book at home called "Photographs for the Tsar", in 1907, Tsar Nicholas commissioned Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii to travel the Russian empire and create a photo albumn(s) for the Tsar. The photos are all pre-WWI. One photo of a monastary clearly shows bullet marks left by Napoleon's soldiers.

These photos are amazing.

Brings that war closer to us doesn't it?

Too bad so many have forgotten it.
Blue

Facinating. I wish I'd seen those before I read "Tolkien's War" last month (highly recommended, BTW).

Those boys in one of the pictures would be in their 90s by now, if they're still with us.

I had no idea that color photography was available that far back. What amazes me even more so is the picture quality and clarity of the photos.

My grandmother used to have a stereoscopic 3-D viewer with stills from WWI. The feeling of depth from a 3-D view of a battlefield strewn with debris and ringed with barbed wire is amazing. There are examples of 3-D shots going back to the Civil War.

This fellow links to both the color photos of the last days of the Tsar, as well as some fascinating color shots of Chicago in WWII and the early '50s.

Thanks for the link Ed.

That is so two weeks ago. *Sigh*

amazing. thanks.

Wow, man the quality of those photos is outstanding. I had no idea that pics like this from that period existed.

Those are amazing.

What I want to know is how did they keep the colors from fading? I have family photos from the late sixties that are more faded than these. I wonder what they did differently during the processing.

Wow. Thanks for sharing.

... WWI wasn't really all that long ago...

On the other hand, here's a caption from another collection of WW1 photos: "These are the men who are said in the present war to have repeated the famous charge made by their ancestors at Waterloo a century ago. Each infantryman, grasping the stirrup of a cavalryman of the Scots Greys, kept pace with the horses, as the two regiments rushed with terrific momentum against the hostile lines."

Kathy (and others):

The process by which the photos, both Lumiére and Prokudin-Gorskii, were made is complex and cumbersome. Basically there are either three cameras, or a single camera used three times, each with a different filter: red, green, and blue. The result is three monochrome ("black and white") negatives, in which the black areas represent the intensity of that particular color. When printed, the black areas would be bright.

Upon printing the light areas are converted to the corresponding color and overlaid; voilá, a color photo.

Monochrome negatives are made of silver oxide, a very stable substance, so they last a long time. If you take the negatives out of storage and print them once more, the colors are as good as ever. Better, digitize the negatives as is and convert and overlay on the computer. Gorgeous.

Newer color is quite different. There are layers that respond to the different colors of light; developing consists of converting the sensitive layers to something stable, then replacing that with colored dyes in proportion. The color dyes are very complex chemically, and complicated molecules break down easily. So the colors fade.

Lumiére's photos will still be vivid centuries from now, though the silver oxide will degrade slowly. Color photos of mine from the 1970s are already unviewable, and many of the color movies of the Fifties are washed-out messes. It may be possible to restore them by laboriously replacing the colors, but they will never be what was originally seen, only today's best guess of what they were.

Pity.

Regards,
Ric

Remarkable photos, thanks.

Sad that we're still cleaning up the aftermath of that war.

It was not as Professor Wilson hoped a war to make the world safe for democracy, rather it was a disaster that cleared the way for a wide variety of evil things, from Socialism (both the nationaist and international varieties) to oil ticks (Saudis).

You can find an excellent gallery of color photography from that era here:

http://www.ummagurau.com/art/russia/gallery.htm

The color process invented by the Lumiere’s was called autochrome. The glass plate negative (not three negatives per image, as previously stated) was covered with a layer of microscopic translucent potato starch grains, each dyed either orange, green or purple. Thus each dyed grain acted as a tiny filter for the color exposed on its portion of the image. When the image is viewed, one sees the color of the potato starch particle through the glass. Particles of a color not present in their portion of the image are completely filtered out and are seen in the image as black spots. The result is a true-color image. Each autochrome, incidentally, is a one of a kind image, owing to the random spreading of potato starch on each negative.

Type “autochome” in Google to find several sites that explain the process much better than I have.

I think these pictures make World War I look even more otherworldy, more like a 19th century war with deadlier stuff, than they make it look modern.

there are very very very few WWI vets left....

legal soldiers have to be at least 105 now.. maybe a bit younger by lying about one's age, but not much better...

it's only too bad that WWI ended too early. If all sides had put serious effort into putting down the Bolshies after Nov 11 1918 we would have been spared the cold war.