Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Typography

31 May 2011, 7:42am

View ’em all here. Incredible.

(via BibliOdyssey, found by @RenderedThreads, retweeted by @eyenoise)

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Early Russian Color Photography

22 Oct 2009, 10:04am

Dagestani types, Man and woman posed outdoors; between 1905 and 1915

Over on The Twitter @scratchbomb submits this awesome find of early Russian color photography from Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. The photos were taken during 1909-1912 and again in 1915 to document the state of the nation before the start of WWI and the Russian Revolution. He developed a three plate photography system that would take three negatives of the same scene yet each was shot through a different filter. Projecting the images through the correct color light could recreate the full color composite. I imagine this was not an easy thing to do.

Unless you are in the digital age. Now they can be brought to life as originally intended. The Library of Congress purchased the collection of nearly 2000 negatives in 1948. Here is a bit about how they were created and then recombined today.

The Emir of Bukhara, 1911

Church in the village of Shaidoma; 1915

And here is a self portrait of the photographer himself:

On the Karolitskhali River, self portrait of photographer Prokudin-Gorskii