Russia, In Colour

Re: Russian color photos.

Absolutely amazing! Thanks!!

Pretty good looking pictures, being @100 years old.

Would say that the pictures were recently enhanced.

You can see that the colors of the portraits are somewhat too rich.
The country side is as good as anything taken with your digital.
You can tell the technique used in the pictures of the river waters, not being still the three picture sequence was not fast inough,though for the period a pretty good technique.

Iggy wants his album back.

Thanks Kate and foobert. The pictures are fantastic, and I saw a number of views of the Urals region that my grandfather would have seen. One picture made me a little sad, and that was one of the "People at Work" series photos of the three generations in the town of Zlatoust taken in 1912. My dad's female cousin spent two years in a labour camp near this town around 1947.

There were a number of villages of Bashkirs in the foothill valleys in the area and they had a unique hobby of borrowing horses at night. However, they also had some redeeming values, such as being honest and helpful if you befriended them or treated them well if you employed them. My wife's grandfather, when still a single young man, would visit them for a few days at a time and tip back a glass or two of Kumiss.

You'd have a heart of stone not to be moved.

Fabulous!

Thanks

Clive

It was a real treat to see these fine old photographs.

I sometimes worry if any of the images we capture today will be seen a hundred years from now. I take more photos now than ever before, but do not print very many. Prints will fade over time unless very carefully stored.

And digital picture files need to be carried forward every few years as new media comes along. Our current favorite storage media - CD or DVD will probably be replaced by something else in the next few years. Even if there will be compatible CD/DVD readers around 20-50 years from now, the data on a disk may deteriorate to the point of being unreadable. I dont think that USB thumbdrives are any better either for long term storage.

When you think about it, this problem exists for the whole realm of digital information representation. Today, just about everything is stored digitally, and if it is not carried forward over a long term, it will be lost.

Long term digital storage - the next big thing.

Amazing photos from that era. Hard to believe what was involved in doing color photography back then compared to how easy it is to snap a 14 Mpixel photograph now.

foobert, you're quite right about the problems with storing digital data. I've got 8 track tapes of digital information which are almost impossible to read unless I contact someone with a tape drive that still reads these tapes. Floppy disks are harder and harder to read and every decade or so I have to transfer my archives to the newest media. Right now I'm using flash memory drives but they don't store information forever and it seems that DVD storage is likely the best option for the long term. Have had no problem reading CD's that I burned 20 years ago. Found a SCSI tape drive at Value Village for $5 which reads my Mac cartridge tapes from 20 years ago but without that drive Gb of data would have been lost forever.

Flash memory, in theory, should store data for centuries if the drives are periodically rewritten as they have the ability to tolerate about 100,000 write cycles.

HDD's need to be rewritten periodically as the magnetic bits fade away if they aren't. I've got lots of HDD's that work just fine for years as long as they're constantly running but turn them off for a few hours and it's a nightmare to get the up and running again so I can copy the data to a new disk drive. If people 100 years ago could figure out how to store images for over a century, then surely we should be able to do the same thing.

Loki

Yeah it's sorta like how crisp the old "tin type" prints are compared to later roll film negatives. Was it mass production/flaw in the process.....or that combined with less talent on the shutter?

These electronic storage things reflect the virtual nature of the systems.....virtual...

Remarkable photos. Thanks Kate.

To see the photo of Tiflis where my grandmother travelled to in order to find my grandfather after WW1......that is a great photo for me.....

I am sure I posted the same link here like 8 years ago.

Hopefully they will be with us in another 100 years! People themselves never really change, do they? It is sad to think that even the youngest in these pictures are now gone. It really does hurry the heart a bit, unless it is made of stone.

Just thinking (I do, once in a while)many of these pictures were taken a mere 40 years before I was born (I'm a forty-niner).