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What made this project remarkable was his use of an innovative technique for taking photographs in full and extremely vivid colour.
He was able to capture colour by using a camera that exposed one oblong glass plate three times in rapid succession through three different colour filters: blue, green, and red. To view his images, he printed positive glass slides of his negatives and projected them through a triple lens magic lantern. The images were projected through the three lenses and, with the use of colour filters, superimposed in full colour on to a screen.
In 1918, Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia and the glass plates of his unique images of Russia on the eve of revolution were purchased from his heirs in 1948 by the U.S. Library of Congress. Many, but not all1, of the plates have been scanned and reconstituted through a process called digichromatography into vivid full colour images. An online exhibition of these images can be found on the Library of Congress web site as well as access to their collection of approximately 2,615 images, 110 of which have been made into full colour renderings.
