Fucking awesome colour photos from 100 years ago

[P3nT4gR4m]

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

[Triple Zero]

Wow ... the past really does look like a bunch of LARP/SCAer posers when not in Black&White

[Freeky]

If those really are real (and I hope they are) that is amazing.

[Triple Zero]

I'm pretty sure they are real.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wow, those are incredible!

[Nast]

I really like stuff like this. When you learn history in school, they present it like a story, or a movie, or some quasi-real narrative that maybe logically you know really happened but have little way to relate to firsthand. Seeing faces, flowers, houses the way we do in our own lives somehow captures the reality so much better.

It's sad also to think that these people are quite dead now.

[Cain]

Oh trust me, it's not sad that all of these people are dead.  Isfandiyar, for example, was the ruler of the Khanate of Khiva, a brutal dictatorship which, until the Russians conquered it, practiced slavery, the ritual flaying alive of political prisoners and supported vicious Turcomen raiders in their attacks on Russian territories.  The raids stopped after Russia turned them into a protectorate, but most of the other practices continued.

Also that fat bastard, Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, is supposedly a direct descendent of Genghis Khan.  If so, he didn't inherit his ancestor's talent for administration, that is for sure.  He brutally oppressed the Tajik population of Bukhara, to the point that even speaking Tajik was punishable by whipping.

In fact, pretty much anyone who was a ruler in Central Asia during the 1800-1920 period was guaranteed to be a massive dick and likely deserved a far worse fate than most of them suffered (being reduced to pawns in the Great Game and occasionally overthrown by the Russians or British).  In fact, when the best rulers in the area are either the British East India Company or Ranjit Singh, your region is pretty much screwed.

I'm sure all those other people in the photos are perfectly nice, though.

[Fractalbeard]

Seeing faces, flowers, houses the way we do in our own lives somehow captures the reality so much better.

This.

That's slick that they figured out the way to make color photos like that.

[E.O.T.]

WOW,

          majestic. beautiful. fantastic photos!

[Dysnomia]

so pretty!

[Jasper]

Looking back at these, I noticed that the moving water had a really cool blur effect that made it look almost like it really is still moving.