This Historian Can Nail Exactly When Vintage Photos Were Shot
An urban history expert recently purchased vintage photos of New York City on eBay and followed several clues that led him to determine the exact month and year the images were taken.
An urban history expert recently purchased vintage photos of New York City on eBay and followed several clues that led him to determine the exact month and year the images were taken.
At the end of October, for the first time in history, you'll have the chance to own one of Ansel Adams' 4x5 view cameras for yourself. Heritage Auctions has gotten their hands on an Arca-Swiss 4x5 inch view camera used by Ansel in the 60s, and on October 27th it goes up on the auction block.
In 1871, the Prevention of Crimes Act made it a legal requirement that anybody who was arrested in England and Wales had to have their photograph taken—thus was born the official "mug shot". But mug shots from the late 1800s look very different from the ones you might see today.
He's known as the author behind the famed Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by most, but the breadth of his disciplines goes far beyond literature. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, more commonly known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, was also a logician, mathematician, an ordained minister and a photographer... yes, a photographer.
In this article, we'll share a collection of his work as we dive into his upbringing, his photography career and the controversy that surrounds it to this day.
The Civil War wasn't the first war to be photographed, but the leaps and bounds that photographic technology had taken leading up to the war in 1861 enabled American photographers at the time to come out en masse when news of the attack on Fort Sumter came.
Many photos came out of the war, showing everything from the horrifically scarred back of an escaped slave, to the bravado of young confederate soldiers. In the video above, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Photography and the American Civil War" exhibit Jeff L. Rosenheim walks us through some of those photos, explaining the role each one played in documenting four years of bloodshed.
In June of last year, we gave you a quick "photo trivia o' the day" lesson on the history of presidential photography. We told you that John Quincy Adams sat for what is currently the oldest surviving photo of a US President, that James Polk sat for the oldest of a US President in office, and that President Obama was actually the first to have his official photo taken digitally. That first of those three facts, however, comes with an interesting story.
The Nikon F, Nikon's first SLR camera, played an important and influential role in photographic history after it was unveiled in 1959. It was the first to combine many of the emerging camera design ideas into a single body, and was the first SLR system widely adopted by professional photographers around the world. This is an interesting 20 minute documentary film that tells the story of how the camera was designed.