Bloody Colourful World

An Indian man in Bangalore has turned his wedding reception into a blood donation drive, according to a report from the BBC. Despite opposition from his parents, who consider 'blood-shed' during a wedding as inauspicious, he and his wife, she a first time donor while he is well-known as a campaigner for blood donation, led the way for blood donations from most of the guests at the party. It isn't for nothing that he's known as Blood Kumar in Bangalore.

If you're inspired by his story and want to donate blood, you can check out the Singapore Red Cross website for more information. Don't worry, it's virtually painless! Just try not to think too much about the large-bore canula stuck in your vein.

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The Library of Congress has a wealth of websites and materials online of digitised library collections, including its well known and well stocked American Memory website. Among the treasures they have put online in their online exhibitions is a remarkable set of photographs, the Prokudin-Gorskii photographic record. Taken between 1900 and 1915, they document the landscape, architecture, and people of the Russian Empire before it fell to the Bolsheviks. The photographer himself, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, was commissioned by the Tsar to take these photographs. What is unique about them is not just that they record a Russia that has since disappeared, but they do so in colour. Colour? In 1915? Prokudin-Gorskii used the ingenious method of exposing three negatives of each picture he wanted to take using three different filters of red, green, and blue. After developing the glass negatives, he would then project the slides in a lantern with the same colour filters, and the three overlapping images would form a colour image, in the same way that modern colour photography is also based on simulating real colour with three pigments.

For me, part of the charm of old photographs is their sharpness of focus. It's quite amazing how the old glass negatives could achieve even better resolution than today's film, and how the old photographers could stand lugging around cases of heavy and fragile equipment all around the countryside. Even more amazing is how they could persuade their subjects to hold still for long enough. Photography used to be an adventure: photographs of faraway exotic lands were highly sought after, and public screenings of lantern slides could attract large, paying audiences. The information explosion of the 20th century has resulted in people being able to get whatever information they want whenever they want it and in whatever quantity, no matter how specialised or obscure, if they are persistent enough. Sadly it has probably caused us to lose some of our sense of wonder and enthusiasm for exploration. With a veritable buffet of diversions available, the singleminded devotion to a particular hobby or passion, in the tradition of the Victorian amateur expert, might either be strengthened or diminished.