Restoring Prokudin-Gorskii's Photographs

I have been fascinated about the antique colour photographs taken by Russian photographer and inventor S. M. Prokudin-Gorskii a century ago, since I first saw the online exhibition The Empire that was Russia. A few years ago, I downloaded and restored some of those photos, but then stopped doing that and concentrated more on my own photography.

Recently, I decided to continue this project and added about 20 new restorations to Prokudin-Gorskii gallery of my new website. Here is one of the latest restorations and one of most difficult I've done so far. (Click to enlarge).

Not only was the original badly damaged, it also had heavy vignetting on the top, which occurred when the photographer used camera movements to correct perspective. The topmost cross was on one plate only, so I had to actually "repaint" the sky.

While colour rendition is subject to artist's taste, I can tell that technically my restorations are better than those done by the Library of Congress, even those done manually not to mention computer generated. When restoring manually, they mostly left the blue channel intact, and I correct defects in all channels.

I am going to upload at least a couple new images per week, depending on how busy I am, so please check my gallery from time to time.

Later I hope to put together a book of PG's photos and make it available for online purchase.

My new website

Haven't updated this blog for a long time, so I will post a few short news to let all my 14 faitful readers know what's going on :)

Finally, after very long procrastination, I have redone my website! I changed my mind several times on how it should look, making it simpler and simpler and finally decided to go with Zenfolio engine. Zenfolio.com is a website for photographers providing a very convenient content management system which graphic designers also can use. Here is the link: http://www.gridenko.com



C & C are welcome!

Spring in High Park

Mamiya 645, 80/1.9, Kodak Portra 160VC

Click to enlarge

Spring Necro-Pictures

Toronto Necropolis and Crematoria







Crematorium 1:



Crematorium 2:


Mamiya 645, 80/1.9, Fuji Astia 100

Click to enlarge.

Riverdale Farm

Mamiya 645, 80/1.9, Fuji Provia 100

Click to enlarge.

Retro

Some antique photos ca. 2009.









Click to enlarge.

The long awaited Sigma SD15 is finally announced. Again.

Here is the brochure with camera specs and a brief history of the Foveon sensor: http://www.sigma-imaging-uk.com/pdfs/SD15%20Brochure.pdf

On paper it looks like a decent upgrade, most of the critical flaws of SD14 fixed, or at least there is some improvement. The camera buffer was increased to 21 RAW files, maximum ISO to 3200 (which probably means usable ISO 800), thew new LCD is 3" and 460K dots (just like my favourite Canon G10!). SD15 shares the same TRUE II image processing engine with DP2 which means better white balance. Everything else is about the same: it still has 4.6 megapixel sensor that is equivalent... not to 14, of course, but about 10 megapixel* of traditional Bayer sensor.

Nothing really exciting and tempting, which is GOOD news. I am not planning to buy any photo gear in the foreseeable future and can patiently wait for prices to drop. Hope it will not take another year before SD15 hits the shelves.

Sigma also announced several new lenses, mostly stabilized versions of existing ones, but there is a unique one with crazy focal length of 8-16 mm! It is the widest rectilinear lens ever made for APS-C cameras. Looks really cool, but I am afraid the price will be prohibitive for amateurs. I think my next lens will be 17-70 OS.

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*I mean equivalent in resolution only. Besides resolution, Sigma photos have some unique quality, so called Foveon Look™ that no other digital camera nor good old film can match.