Want to know what the professional photography industry was like over half a century ago, and what advice was commonly given to aspiring professionals? Check out this 10-minute vocational guidance film from 1946 that offers a quick overview of the various types of photography that people went pro in at the time. Suggested careers include portrait photography, commercial photography, and photojournalism.
At first glance, New York-based photographer Richard Barnes' Civil War photos might look like they were taken from some museum or historical photographic archive. Look a little closer, however, and you'll begin to notice things that are quite peculiar. In one of them, there's a pickup truck parked in the background. In another, a man wears a T-shirt and baseball cap -- certainly not the fashion you'd expect to see in a mid-1800s photo.
The truth is, Barnes creates beautiful war photos that appear to be from over a century ago by using the Civil War-era process of wet plate photography to capture modern day Civil War battle reenactments.
Lunch atop a Skyscraper is one of the most recognizable photos of the 20th century. The 1932 photo shows 11 construction workers taking a lunch break on a girder 850 feet above New York City. A second photo from the same shoot shows four of the men sleeping on the beam. The images are iconic and epic, but may not be as candid as they seem.
New emerging information about the images is casting doubt on the fact that they're simple snapshots showing ordinary workers on the job. Instead, the photos were reportedly staged as part of a promotional effort for the Rockefeller Center.
Check out this photo showing the inside of a camera shop (and pharmacy) from 1910. It's the image on a postcard that's currently being auctioned over on eBay (with a starting bid of $100) by a seller named 2raccoons. Here's the description:
Up for auction is this extraordinary photograph of a woman in standard Gibson dress standing at a store counter purchasing a Kodak folding camera. The store employee is wearing a jacket and bow-tie which adds charm to the photograph. It is uncertain if the woman is actually buying the Kodak camera, or if the scene here is "staged," but $25 is about what one would have paid for the Kodak folding camera at that time, which can be seen on the cash register.
$25 for a top-of-the-line camera. Not bad. Add a couple zeros to that price and you'll get what many DSLRs are selling for these days.
Check out this beastly camera used by Signal Corps during the Cold War. It featured a 100-inch infrared lens that was capable of seeing through over twenty miles of hazy air -- perfect for capturing reconnaissance photographs of enemy strongholds. The camera was so massive that it required two people to operate: one to frame the shot, and one to snap the photo.
100-inches is 2540mm and the camera appears to use 4x5 large format film, so the equivalent 35mm focal length of this cannon-like lens is roughly 760mm.
The world's first color moving pictures have been discovered, dating back to 1902. The film sat forgotten in an old metal tin for 110 years before being found recently by Michael Harvey, the Curator of Cinematography at the National Media Museum in England. The pictures were part of a test reel of early color experiments by an Edwardian inventor named Edward Raymond Turner, and show Turners children, soldiers marching, domesticated birds, and even a girl on a swing set.
Did you know that LCD screens and live view didn’t arrive until a number of years after digital cameras …
Two years ago, San Francisco-based photographer Shawn Clover began to create an amazing series of images, titled 1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend, featuring photographs captured during the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake blended into views of what the city currently looks like.
Hyperspectral cameras are those that can capture information in the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond what the human eye — …
Although Adobe Photoshop's introduction in 1990 spawned the term "Photoshopping", the manipulation of photos has been around pretty much as long as photography itself. To show this fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be holding an exhibition titled, "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop." The show will feature 200 'shopped photographs created between the 1840s and the 1990s, providing a glimpse into how photographers of old use their work to humor and deceive.
If the photograph was a living person, what would his Facebook timeline look like? Photo aggregation service Pixable decided to answer this question, creating a giant infographic on the history of the photograph with the layout of a Facebook timeline. It all starts at the very bottom of the timeline, with the photograph's birth at around 1000 AD. Over the years, we see the marriage he has with Kodak, the Kodachrome process born to the couple a few decades later, and a subsequent relationship she has with Digital Camera.
If you have a free 20 minutes, here's a great 1958 documentary on the life and work of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Created while Adams was living at a house near the Golden Gate Bridge, the film provides a look into his home, interests, attitudes toward art, camera equipment, and photographic techniques.
Want to see what you would look like as an outlaw from the 1800s? With Mugshot Yourself, you can!
It's a simple web app that takes your portrait and combines it with the face of an actual New York City criminal from 1864. You can provide a photo using your webcam, by uploading one, or by selecting a Facebook profile picture.
When you think about photographs from the early 1900s, you probably think about boring monochrome photos of locations or portraits of people with humorless expressions and rigid poses. Photographs costed more in terms of time, effort, and money back then, so photographers didn't waste them on silly photos, right? Wrong.
This series of photographs was created around 1905 by an unknown artist. Titled Bulldogs in Fancy Dress, it's being preserved for eternal chuckles in the Library of Congress' photo archives.
George Eastman House just finished its 6 part video series on photographic processes used throughout history. The short educational videos run about 3-6 minutes each, and provide a great look into the various ways photographers of old created their images.
The Olympic games in London this year makes London the first city to have hosted the modern Olympic Games three times. The previous times were in 1908 and 1948. Here are some photographs captured at the 1908 Olympics 104 years ago, during a time when megaphones were used to announce events, top hats were all the rage, and dresses were worn by female competitors (this was the third games in which women were allowed to compete).
Did you know that Atari was once in the "photo" making business? In 1975 -- 3 years after it's founding -- the young video game company launched the Compugraph Foto, a large coin-operated machine that snapped photos and printed them out as ASCII portraits. Subjects stood in front of a monitor showing their face and then pressed a series of buttons, triggering the 950-pound machine to print out the portrait as a 14x11-inch "photo" on computer paper.
The Sartorialist might be a big name in street fashion photography these days, but snapping impromptu photos of the latest clothing trends is nothing new. Over a century ago, a photographer named Edward Linley Sambourne did the same kind of photography on the streets of London and Paris using a concealed camera. His images form a beautiful historical record of what people wore that deviates from what people typically think of when they hear "Edwardian fashion".
Why My Photographs Are Bad is a photography book for beginners first published in 1902 by a man named Charles Maus Taylor. The book contains many of the same basic tips that can be found in introductory books these days, but also many that are very specific to the way photography was done at the time. Here's a selection of common mistakes that newbie photographers were making over 100 years ago.
There's an abandoned McDonalds in California that's stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.
Check out this blast from the past: it’s a 1986 commercial for the Minolta Maxxum 7000. The Minolta 7000 …
Back in 2010, we shared a video showing Canon’s 1200mm lens — a giant piece of glass …
What you see here is the first image ever uploaded to the World Wide Web. It’s a graphic featuring …
You probably know of the iconic photograph titled Migrant Mother, but do you …
Here are some uncropped (or "unzoomed") versions of iconic photographs that show more context than their famous cropped counterparts. It's interesting to see what photographers and photo editors chose to keep and what they chose to throw away. The image above is an alternate view of Tank Man.
George Eastman House released this video recently that provides a quick lesson on …
Here's your interesting piece of photo trivia 'o the day: John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was the first president to have his photograph taken (the earliest photo still in existence, at least). The daguerreotype was shot in 1843, a good number of years after Adams left office in 1829.
We've heard of camera manufacturers dipping into unrelated fields before, and we've also seen some pretty interesting marketing stunts, but in the early 90's Kodak had already done both... in a colorful, cuddly sort of way. Back then, as an either desperate or creative ploy to get kids into photography, Kodak came out with the Kolorkins: a set of colorful, collectible stuffed animals.
The link between the camera and gun is evident in a shared metaphor, but is historically closer than we might imagine.
The 120° panoramic image (and its crop) you see above is titled "Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati" and was captured in 1848 by Porter and Fontayne from Newport, Kentucky. It was created with eight full-plate daguerreotypes and shows a two mile stretch of the Cincinnati waterfront.