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. Read the rest of this entry »
Nikon created this short video to introduce the various Nikon cameras that have been used during space exploration. The music is pretty cheesy, but it’s pretty interesting if you’re into this kinda thing.
Here’s a scan of a Mechanix Illustrated magazine article from 1941 teaching readers how to get creative with their prints by creating “Shadowgraphs”, a technique that uses photographs for photograms:
In reprinting your negative with a shadowgraph border, you first insert the negative into the enlarger film carrier and project the image on the easel. With the red safety filter in position, place the printing paper on the easel and lay your shaving props directly on the printing paper, arranging them in neat order around the center of interest. Expose for one-third the normal time after which, without moving the paper, shift the positions of the razor blades slightly, and then expose for the second third of the normal time. The last third of the exposure is given with all the props removed from the paper.
Sadly (not maybe not), in the modern world of photography adding ghostly paper clips and razor blades to photos is no longer in vogue. Check out the full article here with more example photos.
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: did you know that at one time Apple (then named Apple Computer) made compact digital cameras? Launched in 1994, the Apple QuickTake was actually one of the first digital cameras available to consumers. Three models were built by Kodak and Fujifilm, and the cameras boasted a whopping 0.3 megapixels and the ability to store eight photos at this resolution. The camera had a flash, but lacked zoom, focusing, image review, and file deletion (the entire contents had to be wiped). Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re a digital photography buff, here’s some required trivia knowledge: what you see above is a photograph of the first digital camera ever built. It was created in December 1975 by an engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steve Sasson, now regarded as the inventor of the digital camera. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, Sasson explains how it was constructed:
It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.
Just last week we wrote that the Museum of London had released an augmented reality iPhone app that overlays historical photographs over live views of the location.
If you don’t live in London, you can play around with the same concept using Historypin, a website that allows you to pin historical photographs onto Google’s Street View. The screenshot above shows a photograph of London bikers in 1926. Even though the views aren’t “live” like with the iPhone app, it’s still neat to see old photos in the context of present day images.
The Mark III Hythe Machine Gun Camera was a camera designed to mimic the American-made Lewis machine gun, and was used by the British air force during World War I to train their aerial gunners in air-to-air combat. The reason was that 120 film was much cheaper than live .303 ammunition, and that the resulting photographs would inform the evaluators of how accurate the pilot was during the combat simulation. To train the gunners in changing magazines, the gun camera included a fully functional — albeit useless — Lewis gun magazine.
Needless to say, this camera would probably give you problems if you were to use it nowadays.
Streetmuseum is a new (and free) augmented reality iPhone app created by the Museum of London that allows you to browse historical photographs in various parts of the city.
The app leads you to various locations around London using either the map or GPS. Once you’re there, click the “3D View” button, and the app will recognize the location and overlay the historical photograph over the live video feed of the real world, giving you a brief glimpse into how the past looked.
We’ve seen projects that overlaid historical photos over modern ones, but this is the first time we’ve seen an augmented reality app do it for you in real time. Here are a few more examples:
If only this were available in every big city around the world.
Did you know Nikon SLRs were doing video before things shifted toward digital? This commercial was made back in 1997 by Alastair Thain, and was shot entirely on a Nikon F5 SLR camera, which could shoot up to 8 frames per second. More than 200 rolls of 36-exposure film were developed to create the resulting film.
“The Nikon F5, technically the quickest camera in the world.”
Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse is a historical consultant in Amsterdam who loves making photographs in the same locations as historical photos.
These amazing photographs were created by shooting new photos of old locations, and mixing them with the old photographs she finds:
Teeuwisse tells us,
I got the idea when I tried to find out more about some photos I found on a flea market. Trying to discover where they were taken I looked around my city, found the locations and took photos to compare then and now. Mixing them was just a experiment and because I was happy with the result I decided to do the same with other historical photos.
I am a historical consultant for film, tv, authors, museums, etc. and I even have a 1930s lifestyle. History is part of my daily life, I can’t help but see the shadows of the past.
