Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

All right we've got Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, now who is this guy? Basically he was a Russian who traveled Russia around 1905 documenting the country via photographs for the Tsar:

In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

What's neat about the photos he took is that they were in colour:

His process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different coloured filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly-coloured light, it was possible to reconstruct the original colour scene. He had no system for making color prints of the photographs. Stray movement within the camera's field of view would show up as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times. Much later, developments in color photography would be able to combine these colors into one film.

Then the revolution happened and Sergi fled, his family was murdered and he dies in paris in 1944.

In 1948 the US Library of Congress purchased his photos, and they are available to look at online at the Library of Congress and over at The Russian Record.

It was Rod's post about that photo that spurred me to finally post this.