Phanatic posted:

One of the early ways of doing color photography used black and white film, but color filters. Others did it before him, but a Russian named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky is probably the most famous practitioner.

The way this worked is that you'd take three separate exposures of the subject, one through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter. Then the three developed plates could be precisely aligned, and you could either project light through a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter, and then through the prints to yield a vibrant color projection, or use them to generate color prints with CMY inks. To avoid having to actually load the camera, take a shot, and then repeat that two more times while keeping everything aligned, there were special cameras for this that'd split the incoming light and send it to all three plates at the same time.

The results were pretty spectacular. This one's from 1911: