Did you know that the first digital camera invented in 1975 didn’t actually produce the first digital photograph? The first digital photo actually came almost two decades earlier in 1957 when Russell Kirsch made a 176×176 pixel digital image by scanning a photograph of his three-month-old son. The low resolution was due to the fact that the computer they used wasn’t capable of storing more information.
(via Discovery News)
This photograph of Boulevard du Temple in Paris was made in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, the brilliant guy that invented the daguerreotype process of photography. Aside from its distinction of being a super early photograph, it’s also the first photograph to ever include a human being. Because the image required an exposure time of over ten minutes, all the people, carriages, and other moving things disappear from the scene. However, in the bottom left hand corner is a man who just so happened to stay somewhat still during the shot — he was having his shoes shined.
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It’s Friday, so let’s kick back – here’s a dose of completely-useless-but-kinda-interesting trivia: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs has done wedding photography. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison is good friends with Jobs, and when Ellison married novelist Melanie Craft in 2003, Jobs was the official wedding photographer. The other photographer was Ellison’s son David.
It’d be interesting to see the resulting photographs.
Image credit: Steve Jobs Keynote by acaben and Larry Elllison on stage by Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2009
Last Friday an anonymous poster on the photography board of 4chan sparked a discussion that rippled into the blogosphere after freezing their camera to see whether ISO performance improves at lower temperatures.
They stuck their Sony A350 into the freezer for 15 minutes, and posted the following before and after comparison of noise at ISO 3200:
Regardless of whether or not these results were fabricated, it has long been (though perhaps not widely) known among photographers that digital cameras have better ISO performance (i.e. less noise) at lower temperatures, which is why sensors are often cooled for astro-photography. Other photographers also report improved ISO performance when shooting in very cold environments.
Zodiac Light did an interesting experiment in which a Canon 350D was cooled, and the amount of noise measured. They found that cooling the sensor resulted in a 40% drop in the amount of noise.
Obviously you shouldn’t freeze your nice camera to test this out yourself, but it’s an interesting fact to know, and could be useful if you’re interested in long exposure photography.
(via The Phoblographer)
Thanks to Nathan Yan for briefing us on thermal noise.
Image credit: Don’t drop your camera! by Island-Life and used with permission.
