As long as there have been empires, there have been monarchs presenting them to the world through rose-colored lenses. Under Czar Nicholas II, blue and green got introduced to the palette. In 1909, Nicholas authorized Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii to document his empire using a new technique called additive color. Over a period of about six years, Prokudin-Gorskii took some 10,000 pictures,