In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.
Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera that exposed one oblong glass plate three times in rapid succession through three different color filters: blue, green, and red. For formal presentations, the negative plate was placed in a triple lens lantern so the three exposures could be superimposed to form a full color image on a screen. Due to the brief time lapse between the fixation of the three frames on the plate, the perspective is slightly distorted to a varying degrees on the final image and results in random shimmers of color.
An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin, circa 1910