Since I discovered it a few months back, EnglishRussia.com has become one of my favorite daily ‘net habits. While the photos and videos posted there are sometimes banal or even just plain stupid, they are just as often hauntingly beautiful glimpses of an alien world. Today’s entry is especially fascinating: a collection of color photographs taken around the year 1910. The photographer, a chap named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, came up with a technique of shooting multiple exposures of the same scene through colored filters. When the monochrome pictures were projected over the top of each other, the color of the scene was reconstructed with startlingly realistic accuracy. Nowadays, his images can be easily recombined with digital imaging, and the results look like stills from Doctor Zhivago. But they’re not… they’re time capsules of people and places that predate the communist revolution that transformed the old Russian Empire into the USSR. Amazing stuff, well worth your time. I especially like these folks…