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Comment by craigching | Hacker News Reader

1898 is pretty early in the technology of photography, maybe I didn't read carefully enough, but I would like to know what was used to take these photographs. They are very interesting and look better than I would expect for 1898!

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A little bit more about the people who took photos and all of the photos can be found here. The submitted article is more or less blogspam

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc/colony.html

As to the history of photography, when these were taken Fenton's [in]famous pictures of the Crimean War were already 50 years old. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky colour pics of the Russian empire are of about the same early 20th century vintage.

Ah, thanks a lot for that link, much more information! The OP looks to be a bit misleading as well, not all of the photographs were necessarily from 1898:

  The majority of the images depict Palestine (present day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946.

Here’s a Library of Congress collection of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s colour photographs from the 1900s and 1910s; I particularly love his color portrait of Leo Tolstoy, who seems such a quintessential 19th-century figure but in fact lived long enough to sit for a color photograph in 1908:

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=prok

It certainly is 'blogspam' - at least one of the photos, complete with caption, is lifted from Wikipedia [0] (not even Wikipedia's source's caption [1]).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedouin

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/item/2019694946/

Old photos can look amazing because they used really large film. What is considered a full frame sensor now was the cellphone camera of its time.

Indeed, this is why Leica, the inventors of using 35 mm film for stills, called it Kleinbild - “small image”. At the time people doubted you could make optics good enough for this to work out, but Zeiss (inventors of modern optical engineering) and Leitz proved those naysayers wrong.

Yep, my 1943 photography book calls 35mm "miniature format"

It's over 50 years after the invention of photography. Plate photography was already quite a robust technology at that point in time. Sensitivity and exposure times weren't too bad either. The first experimental color photographs were made some 20 years earlier.

For reference this color photo was made about 10 years after these: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsc.03959/

Smiling makes me think it was later, along with the white woman, and baby.

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