Quick Hit:

The Library of Congress's Website has an extraordinary exhibition of photographs taken in Russia during the early 20th Century by photographer and inventor Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. As explained more fully by the LOC's website, Prokudin-Gorskii devised a camera with three lens that took separate black and white images of the same scene. By filtering each lens with a different color gel, he could control the saturation of the blacks and greys in each image; after the images were developed, he would project them through a multi-lens projector with the same color filter arrangement as the camera. By overlapping the three images, he was able to create color projections (though not color photographs -- the chemical processes necessary to create color photos would not be invented for another twenty-five odd years). In 1908, Czar Nicholas commissioned Prokudin-Gorskii to take photographs of the Russian Empire, and outfitted him with access to all areas of the empire, as well as a special rail car that served as a travelling darkroom. Between 1908 and approximately 1914, Prokudin-Gorskii took thousands of pictures of the Russian empire, its people and its landscapes; after the empire fell, he escaped to Europe, taking many of his negatives with him.

In 1944, his glass-plate negatives were purchased by the Library of Congress. Recently, using a process that they call "digital chromatography", the LOC has been able to digitally recombine the negatives and create color images. The results are astounding and worth looking at. Check them out here. [There is a full digital archive, as well, which contains both black-and-white and color images. Check it out here]