One of the problems is that movies re-enforce that image. Even when the past is depicted in color, effects are applied, as spoofed in this 5 second film: http://5secondfilms.com/watch/its_not_ww2._its_hbo
What struck me most about the photos was the formality of the clothing. People used to dress nicer. I remember seeing an old Yankee Stadium crowd shot and almost everyone was wearing a tie. It makes for nicer imagery, but I'm not sure I would want to return to that.
Clothing was much more expensive until the early-to-mid twentieth century; circa 1900 a pair of men's trousers would cost 8-10 times as much as a proportion of per-capita income than they did in 2000. Consequently, old/damaged clothing was cleaned and repaired, fashion fads changed much more slowly, and wearing new/formal/tailored garments was as much an ostentatious display of wealth as driving a Porsche or a BMW might be today.
(Cheaper fabric and increased automation in clothing factories -- the deployment of sewing machines and then sergers is where the change really got going -- drove down prices; the £2 mass-produced suit in the UK in the 1920s meant that any working man could afford a new suit, so the suit became a working garment and the display of wealth moved on to new fields. And that's why we have ultra-cheap, badly-made clothing, fast-changing fashion, and a casual attitude to what we wear.)
(( A good suit is something special. But you can keep the neckties ... ))
In addition to the other arguments mentioned about the clothing, one more thing: colour photographs, and indeed any photographs, all that survives from the time, were very, very uncommon, so you'd take out your best clothes for the occasion. You won't know what the peasants wore their entire life except for the day the official Tsar's photographer visited.
Today, people dress nicer for important and/or rare pictures (weddings, official portraits, etc) than for point and shoot pictures at the park.
Depends on what kind of pictures you are looking at. http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/html/ww_i_v_0.html are clearly old, even though they are from about the same time those pictures in Russia was taken. The same is the case for the pictures from the 30 that was posted a short while ago, which I guess is because we are a lot more familiar with the way western males dressed, so we can easier pick out the things that don't look exactly right.
It’s funny that the exact same process the photographer uses (multiple exposures with different color filters) is still used by space probes and telescopes. The reason for that is flexibility. Astronomers can use a whole array of different filters to get exactly the light they want, they are not limited to a 'hard coded’ Bayer Array [+]. It’s more useful for precise data collection. (Also, stars and planets hold relatively still, at least compared to humans.)
His process used a camera that took a series of three monochrome pictures in sequence, each through a different-coloured filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly coloured light, it was possible to reconstruct the original colour scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
From a technical point of view, one of many interesting things there is the discussion of how the separately-made color frames were stitched into RGB images (he made separate R, G, and B exposures with a few seconds between them, so in many cases his models changed position, etc.): http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/process.html
(While merging similar images with the same color response is a fairly well-studied problem, merging different channels is an interesting challenge. Consider, for example, trying to algorithmically merge separate R, G, and B exposures of an Italian flag flapping in the breeze. It’s slightly, although not very much, like interpolating the Bayer array in a consumer camera.)
There are no known restrictions on the use of these images. The issue of copyright was not addressed during the purchase of the collection from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs in France in 1948. French law is unclear as to whether the heirs own any rights. However, they have expressed concern about "commercial use," and, as a courtesy to them, the Library is supplying interested researchers with the following contact information: [address given].
P.s.: the LOC’s photo and print collections in general are outstanding. They make extremely high-res scans of things like Matthew Brady’s Civil War portraits, political cartoons from the Russo-Japanese War, Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints, and Dorothea Lange’s dust bowl photos available for free over HTTP.
How disgusting that we can't just assume that these 100 year old photos are public domain. In the US, the Constitution doesn't really even allow for copyright protection on works of purely historical interest, but modern copyright laws and treaties don't take this into account.
They (unlike many of these) actually do feel like they were taken a long time ago, but they're excellent pictures and well-worth looking at if this kind of thing interests you.
Seeing the past in colour can be jarring. I just watched a documentary called Photographer (Fotoamator) about a batch of colour photos taken in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during the Second World War. To contrast the colour photos of the past, modern footage of Lodz and interviews with a survivor of the ghetto were shot in black and white. It was disconcerting and very effective.
That’s not shutter lag. The camera just moved between the exposures. It’s impossible to get such a effect with a digital camera or color film in an analog camera. You can only get it when combining different exposures.
Also, digital cameras have no shutter lag, at least not noticeable. The problem is autofocus, that’s what takes time.
Pretty much all non-DSLR cameras use contrast detection for focusing. The lens quickly shifts from the closest possible focus distance to infinity and the camera looks for contrast changes on the picture. If the contrast is high the camera knows that the picture is sharp. (This leads to dismal failures whenever you want to take a photo of something with inherently low contrast like a white wall.) DSLRs use optical phase detectors which give direct distance readings, the lens is then shifted to the correct setting. (As you can imagine, this method is faster than contrast detection.)
This process just takes time. That didn’t happen to you with older cameras because they don’t have autofocus. All you have to do is remember to focus long before you plan on taking the picture, that was the case when you could only manually focus and that is still the case today. Half-press the shutter button and be happy.
But that’s not what most people are complaining about when they complain about shutter lag. 0.1 seconds doesn’t matter when you want to take photos of your kids, contrast detect AF does.
If we think it's incredible to look at these high-fidelity color pictures of 100 years ago, imagine people 200 years in the future looking back at our perfectly preserved digital images.
How different is the dress in these pictures from the comparative ones posted in colour of America. Very much unlike today uniform like clothes all over, except for perhaps Arab nations.
These pics were taken from the southern parts of Russia though. Most of the colorful dresses were from the Caucuses and the various Asiatic peoples that were part of Russia at the time.
You will notice that most Russian men in there are wearing spiffy shiny uniforms. Russians loved their uniforms in the late Tsarist period. You can even see why during the revolution the Tsar's supporters were called the Whites. Notice how the top bosses in the railroads pics always wear shiny white uniforms.
I did not mean actual uniform, I meant how we all today wear t-shirts and jeans and same coats and everything whether one is in Russia, or Japan, or even China I think, or of course Europe and America and Brazil. Its like, where has diversity gone in dress.
It is funny how after looking at so many black and white pics of the past one starts to imagine that the past took place in black and white.