Ogawa Kazumasa's hand colored photographs

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Ogawa Kazumasa was a pioneer Japanese photographer, publisher and photomechanical reproduction. In his day he was perhaps best known for his photographs of the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars. You can read more about him at TAP's article: Ogawa Kazumasa and the Halftone Photograph: Japanese War Albums at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

He also experimented in hand coloring photos. This post shows some of his hand colored work. There are more after the jump, and even more at Getty Museum's archive of his work. At that archive you can also find many of his non-colored photographs.

The Colors of Tsarist Russia

Prior to World War One, a Russian photographer named Prokudin-Gorsky developed a means of taking color photographs. He did it by taking three monochromatic pictures, each with a color filter, and then recombined them by projecting specifically colored light through them. The result are some extremely striking color photos of bygone days that we're used to seeing in shades of gray.

Supported primarily by his job in a metal works, he established his studio in 1901 to perfect his process. His break came in 1908 when he photographed Leo Tolstoy.

This brought him to the Attention of Tsar Nicholas II, who funded his scheme of traveling throughout the Russian Empire and making a photographic record of what he saw.

More of his remarkable photographs, as well as further details of his life, can be found at Socyberty in the post The Incredible Century Old Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky (H.T. Neatorama).