Hyperlapses, or timelapses with the camera traveling great distances, have become all the rage these days, but have you ever wondered how far back the technique goes? The short film above, titled "Pacer," was captured back in 1995 using a Bolex 16mm film camera. It is being called the world's oldest hyperlapse.
Bear with me now. I promise there are photos after all this preamble. I’m going to try to keep the camera talk to a dull roar on this post even though it is principally about lenses.
Over the last 6 weeks, I’ve had a fever… a fever that has but one cure… more old Minolta lenses!
Want to start your own camera museum? There's a new listing on eBay that can put you on the fast track to doing so. It's for a gigantic collection of roughly 600 vintage cameras from between 1880 and 1980. The description claims the lot could be turned into one of the largest camera museums in the world.
Long before high-sync speedlights were ever a thing, there was a bleeding-edge technology that forever changed the way people photographed subjects. It was called magnesium flash powder.
If you've got storage containers-worth of old family photos sitting in an attic somewhere, a clever new app wants to help you turn those old, physical photos into digital files without having to get a desktop scanner involved.
A photographer's notebook from over a century ago has been discovered in Antarctica. It belonged to British explorer and photographer George Murray Levick, who was part of Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition to the continent from 1910 to 1913.
Toronto-based photographer Pete Thorne has been shooting a series of studio portraits of dogs. Not just any dogs, though: Thorne is only accepting subjects that are "really, really old." The project is titled "Old Faithful," and now includes over 50 dogs.
These days, it seems that if you want to get a nice sharp lens, you have to spend $1000 on a piece of L glass. Aside from the nifty fifty’s of the world, there are very few lenses that deliver quality results at a low price. But if you look harder, there are actually a few old lenses that still offer amazing quality for extremely low price. How is that possible? Well, it is. Keep reading to learn how.
This video is a "then-and-now" comparison showing the Dutch city of Alkmaar in 1914 and in 2014. It was created by Dutch photographer Frits de Beer, Tara Rikkers and Michael de Vreugd, Alkmaar natives who wanted to see how his city had changed over the past 100 years.
Photographer Anastasia Pottinger's recent viral project began when she was offered up an interesting proposition for a photoshoot; one that was very different from what she normally photographs.
Usually, she shoots portraits of babies, young children and families. But this time, the Missouri native was offered the opportunity to photograph a 101-year old woman... nude.
Rachel Sussman's quest to document some of the oldest living things on Earth before they become the newly extinct has been going on for nigh on a decade. But now, that series is hitting the mainstream like never before, as the photographs she has so painstakingly captured are compiled into a book called, appropriately enough, The Oldest Living Things in the World.
This is pretty cool, and might just give you a good laugh at the same time. Go back in time and see what a photography 'holiday camp' (read: photography workshop) was like back in 1961, as what look to be a bunch of very amateur photographers try and learn to better compose and set up shots of beautiful women.
Well, if it isn't another tale of a photo contest scandal. Earlier this year, it was the World Press Photo winner, now it's the Sony World Photography Awards -- Youth Award. You would think that after a while people would learn, but it doesn't seem that way.
There's something awesome about vintage ads. This rings especially true for photography ads, because while technology ads of the past for things like computers or other gadgets might seem comically archaic, the text in something like this Leica M4 ad could very well be seen in the next Pure Photography-like campaign.
Rejoice, all ye illustrators and designers, at least if your work involves antiquarian subjects. The British Library has just posted more than a million copyright-free images to its Flickr photostream, and the pickings are choice if you need to illustrate anything from phrenology to 17th century geological theories.
When my grandmother was suddenly stricken by a massive stroke, my family had to make the heartbreaking decision to let her go. The doctor told us that even if she were to survive it, she wouldn’t be the person we knew. I remember thinking at that moment, 'if you could only know what kind of woman she is!' We all knew that it wouldn’t be fair to her to bring her back in a way that wouldn’t allow her to live her life her way.
There's an awesome little subreddit that has been getting a lot of press coverage as of late. It's called ColorizedHistory, and is a 20,000+ person strong community of "Amateur Historians" who are interested in the idea of creating high quality colorized versions of historical black-and-white photographs.
Wet plate photographer Rob Gibson believes that there are those among us who are "flame-keepers of the past," and if such people exist, he is certainly one of them. Like the others out there who continue to practice age-old photographic techniques such as the daguerreotype or wet collodion process, his passion harkens back to a simpler time -- a time he does his best to recreate with 100% accuracy through his lens.
These days, it's easy to take for granted what the magic of the Internet, wireless technology, and fiber optic cables have made possible, but there was a time when sending a photograph a long distance in a short time wasn't quite that easy.
For instance, in 1926, someone on an oceanliner called the S.S. President Roosevelt snapped the above photo of the S.S. Antinoe during a rescue attempt. When that photo was sent almost instantly from London to New York City, it was such a big deal that the April 1926 issue of Science and Invention printed a huge infographic to show its readers how this miracle was achieved.
Photographer Christopher Domakis has photographed both sides of the urban coin in China. Through two unrelated photo series, Hutong and Microcosm, he has managed to juxtapose the quiet closeness of the narrow Hutong alley neighborhoods of Beijing with the hustle and bustle of the rapidly growing urban developments in many of China's biggest cities.
About a month ago, we shared some stunning footage that showed what London was like all the way back in 1926. The original filming was done by Claude Friese-Greene, whose father William invented the 'Biocolour' technique of capturing color film footage.
That particular video was a compilation of snippets that Friese-Greene had filmed in London when he returned form a 2-year journey. He called the final product The Open Road, and it was a 26-part series that took him all over Britain. Fortunately for us, much of it has now been digitized and uploaded bit-by-bit to YouTube by The BFI National Archive.
About a year ago, I was sitting around narcissistically Google-ing myself when I came across the photo above of "Robert C. Paetz + Mother". It was dated 1923 and was being sold for $12 by a man named Paul in Northern California.
I quickly did the math and figured it was my 93-year-old grandfather and my great-grandmother, Matilda (who eventually lived until 102 when I was 16).
Want to see how old film single-lens reflex cameras were put together? Clare (Wyoh on Tumblr) recently found a number of camera schematics inside an old French magazine from decades ago. The schematics show exploded views of the Nikon F, Nikon F2, Nikon FM, and Nikon FA SLRs. Each camera is shown in its most basic parts, which are numbered and labeled (in French).
Belgian photographer Filip Bunkens recently did an engagement photo shoot with a couple named Mattias and Adinda, who proposed that it be 1920s-themed. Last Sunday morning they gathered at a local jazz bar for the session.
Product photos for clothing lines typically feature generic, attractive models, since the point of the images is to make the clothes accessible and desirable to consumers. Yuekou, an online clothing store in China, has found great success by using a different approach: its photos for teen girl outfits feature a 72-year-old man.
Back in 1998, PC World magazine published a review of the Sony Mavica …
Snapping mirror self-portraits may have gotten a huge boost from the introduction of digital photography and smartphoneography, but it is by no means a new activity limited to our era. The photograph above was created back in 1917 -- nearly 100 years ago! It was snapped by an Australian flying ace named Thomas Baker when he was 20 years old.
Photographer Dominique Vankan wanted to play around with the old Autochrome Lumière process from the early 1900s, so he built himself a custom large format camera using LEGO pieces, cardboard, and duct tape.
If you want a 50mm f/1.4 lens for your DSLR, you'll need to shell out at least a couple hundred bucks, even if you buy one made by a third-party manufacturer. For those of you who don't mind losing autofocus, you can get the same focal lengths and apertures for much cheaper by buying some old glass and an adapter. By much cheaper, we mean as low as $10-$20! India-based photographer Brock Whittaker recently did this after seeing an auction on eBay for an old Mamiya camera kit.
Los Angeles Times Jay L. Clendenin spent four weeks leading up to the Olympics traveling around Souther California, making portraits of athletes on the US Olympic Team. While he certainly wasn't the only one shooting the athletes, Clendenin chose an interesting way of capturing them: in addition to using Canon 5D Mark IIs for digital photos, he also used a 4x5-inch field camera and a 100+-year-old Petzval lens. When displayed side-by-side, the photos show an interesting contrast between "old" and "new".
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.
Here’s a video that’s fascinating in light of Kodak’s bankruptcy announcement today. It was created back in …
Similar to the centenarian portraits we shared earlier today, here’s a beautiful video with moving portraits (both …
For his project titled Jahrhundertmensch, German photographer Karsten Thormaehlen shot portraits of elderly men and women who have reached the ripe old age of 100, also known as a "centenarian". In 2009, the UN estimated that there are only about 455,000 centenarians in the world.
For her project titled "Elderly Animals", photographer Isa Leshko found and photographed various animals in the twilight of their lives.
Check out this awesome picture frame: it’s an old french door that was cut in half, stripped, painted, distressed.
Here’s a strange (and extremely rare) piece of camera gear: the Leica Telephoto …
Photo-enthusiast etxenike recently won a spool of Verichrome Pan 116 film in an auction, and discovered that it had already been exposed. He had the film developed, and found that five of the eight photographs survived -- not bad for film that has been sitting around since the 50s or 60s!
Photo restorer Bob Rosinsky of Top Dog Imaging wrote …
For part of his MA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Brendan Corrigan visited car boot sales -- a kind of market where people sell things out of their trunks -- and purchased old cameras for about the price of a roll of film. He then had the used film inside each camera developed, publishing the photos online alongside the cameras they were found in (along with the price he paid for the camera). His project is called "Make me an offer".