Want to see what London looked like back in the year 1927? Check out this beautiful color footage shot in various London locations by Claude Friese-Greene, an early British pioneer of film. Frisse-Greene created a series of travelogues nearly 90 years ago using a color process developed by his father William Friese-Greene.
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Retouching and manipulating photographs is done with fancy photo-editing programs these days, but back in 1946, making adjustments required a lot more than a computer, some software, and some pointing-and-clicking skills. Retouching required a whole box of tools, a very sharp eye, and an extremely steady hand.
Last year, Gene Gable of CreativePro came across a retouching book from 1946, titled, “Shortcuts to Photo Retouching For Commercial Use.” In it, retoucher Raymond Wardell explains the basics of the techniques at the time–think of it as a “Photoshop 101″ book for photographers who came more than half a century before us.
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One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of “big camera” sensors into “small camera” bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that’s smaller in size, why wouldn’t you want to? (That’s the idea, at least).
The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography — the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we’ve compiled photos from those “good ol’ days” to see how far photography has come.
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If you want a taste of how fast technology progresses in the world of digital photography, just look at the consumer camera industry through the lens of a company that continues to make a big splash: Apple.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, cameras on phones were horrible and viewing those shoddy pictures was a pain. Then, almost overnight, the smartphone photography revolution — and the slow demise of the compact camera — began.
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Yesterday, we shared an interview with a young Annie Leibovitz, in which she discussed some of her most iconic photos. For today’s blast from the past, we have this short interview with Greg Heisler, in which a very young version of the Heisler we know and love tells the story behind his photographs of the American Ballet Theatre. Read more…
Annie Leibovitz is one of the most iconic portrait photographers of our time, and in this video we get to hear a young version of the 63-year-old photography legend talk about her past and her hopes for a future that is now her present.
From Richard Prior to the Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon that was taken the day Lennon was killed, Leibovits speaks about some of her most iconic photographs. Photographs that, at the time, weren’t quite so far in her past.
(via ISO 1200)
Last week we featured some Sears catalog ads for camera kits from back in 1900, and shared how complete camera kits were selling for just $15.35. Now fast forward a century to the 2000s, when this advertisement appeared 9 years ago. You could buy a “massive” 256 metabyte SD card or a 512MB CF card for your camera for just $100 and $150 (respectively)! For about $100 these days, you can buy a 128 gigabyte SD card.
256GB SD cards cost a hefty $700 these days, but in another 9 years, we’ll almost certainly be poking fun at that price tag as well.
Image credit: Photograph by gfraser and used with permission
Want to buy all the camera equipment you need to start a photography business for just $15.35? All you’ll need is… a time machine! Reddit user sneeden found this Sears Roebuck and Co. consumer guide for the fall of 1900. Two of the pages inside the catalog are for view camera kits that can help anyone “start in a pleasant and good paying business.”
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After sharing that short feature yesterday on the last roll of Kodachrome, it seems appropriate to share this once-super-popular song written about the same film.
Simply titled, “Kodachrome,” it was written by American musician Paul Simon after the first breakup of Simon & Garfunkel.
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Back in 1998, PC World magazine published a review of the Sony Mavica MVC-FD71 as the digital camera industry was beginning to pick up steam. He’s what they wrote:
[...] the original model took about 8 seconds to save a photo to a disk, this version averaged a more tolerable 4 seconds. In addition, Sony has added some nifty new features. These include the ability to make copies of floppies using just the camera–very handy if you want to hand out extra disks on the spot. A new quarter-resolution (320 by 240) option also makes it faster to e-mail photographs. (The camera’s full resolution is 640 by 480.) A built-in menu on the MVC-FD71′s LCD screen permits you to easily take advantage of useful new options such as these.
My main complaint? The high price tag. List-priced at $799, the Mavica costs more than many high-quality 35mm cameras. And as with most digital cameras, this model fails to deliver image quality that is comparable to the quality produced by a 35mm.
The reviewer also commends the camera for weighing in at just 1.2 pounds.
Sony Mavica Camera Slims Down, Speeds Up [PCWorld via MetaFilter]
Image credit: Sony Mavica MVC-FD71_0433 by Bobolink
