Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863 - 1944) is a Russian scientist and photographer, an outstanding innovator in the area of color photography.At the beginning of XX century the color photography was technically complicated and expensive. In order to obtain the color pictures S. Prokudin-Gorsky used usual black-and-white photographic plates and a special camera made by his own construction. This camera could take three pictures rapidly of the same view through the three different colour filters - blue, green and red ones. It was made three slides on the one plate of the taken photographic plate that were located one over another following - "blue", "green" and "red". After that they were projected on a screen by virtue of the special slide projector where every slide was projected through its colour filter. As a result the screen had the color image.
The Tzar Nikolay The Second taking care of people's enlightenment, has charged Sergey Mikhaylovich with the task to take pictures of different sides of life in the regions which were, at that time, the parts of Russian Empire. S. Prokudin-Gorsky travelled over Russia and made a thousand of pictures.
During revolution he went abroad and his photo archives both were partially gone and partially taken out. Lately these archives were very hard to transform into usual color pictures. The most part of them had nontrivial space divergence between the three colour versions. The members of Congress Library of the USA where the most part of these archives is have done a lot of the work digitizing the slides. Using the modern computer technologies of the image transformation they have obtained the color pictures out of three slides for some of them.
In the site Congress Library of the USA you can read about S. Prokudin-Gorsky and of his method taking the colour pictures and see a lot of the pictures.
As well in the site the virtual exhibition of S. Prokudin-Gorsky work The Empire That Was Russia has been opened. It contains about a hundred of color works and the color picture Nilovay Hermitage became a "visiting card" of this exhibition.
