Color photographs of "Russian" from 100 years ago

These pictures are from a remarkable collection featured at The Big Picture. The photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, used a variant on time lapse, with a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. In some, there is little to no evidence of the time lapse process, in others, the running water looks thick with layers, in still others—like the charming one of children below—you can see that the subjects must have had a very hard time following the presumed instructions not to move a muscle or even blink, probably for many long minutes. How can a kid hold still that long?

It's a great collection, quite beautiful, and from another world than ours. There's a good representation at this site. I recommend taking a gander.

The quotation marks are to indicate that many of the pictures are from now independent states like Uzbekistan.