The Earliest Surviving Photograph of an American City
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 Cincinatti waterfront. Codex 99 writes, The panorama is not only the first...
Exploding Photographers, Disappearing Clothes, And the Development of Film
It’s been a while since I wrote a history article and two or three people seemed to like them. I’ve pretty much covered the development of early cameras and lenses so it’s time to consider the way we recorded those images so other people could see them. No, I’m not talking about Facebook. I’m talking...
The “BEFORE” Shots: Eerie Rescue Photos 100 Years After The Titanic Went Down
While we USA folks were struggling to get our taxes handled a couple days ago on April 15th, we shouldn’t have been fussing or celebrating, we should have been thinking of the lives lost aboard the RMS Titanic–which sunk 100 years ago on that day. Since this week marks that horrific — albeit fascinating —...
A Revolving Self Portrait Created in 1865
Here’s a revolving self-portrait created back in 1865 by French photographer Félix Nadar (real name Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). Nadar was the first person in history to take aerial photographs (he was a balloonist) and was one of the pioneers of artificial lighting (he photographed in the catacombs of Paris). Nadar also created an impressive collection of...
A Cover Story
A couple months ago I had the cover of Newsweek. It was a stock shot of the Navy Seals, running the beach at Coronado, their West Coast training base. I’ve worked with the Seals a bunch, and many of those frames are in the stock library at Getty Images, who made the contact and the...
Milestones
You know you’ve been in the picture making business for a while when certain milestones rise up and pass you by like a sign on the highway. Trust me, as you get older, those signs loom faster and whisk by quicker. Your pictures then, become a marker, an “I was there” notation, surely as the...
Lynn’s Blog
This blog has been a long time coming, as Lynn tends generally prefers to stay in the background of things. All of us at the studio had a hand in prodding her just a touch to write this. Which is a wonderful turn of events. Lynn and I have worked together for nearly 20 years....
Albert Kahn’s Documentation of Humanity Through Early Color Photography
Albert Kahn was a wealthy French banker who launched a project in the early 1909 that aimed to create a photographic record of the world. The first commercially successful color photography process, Autochrome Lumière, had just arrived two years earlier, and Kahn decided to use the medium to both document human life and to promote...
A Brief History of the Animated GIF
PBS art series Off Book created this short video that presents a brief history of the animated GIF: GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from functional to entertainment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was created, they...
The Work of Russian Color Photography Pioneer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, while the world was still shooting black and white photographs, Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was busy inventing techniques for creating color images. Credited with capturing the only known color photo of Leo Tolstoy, Prokudin-Gorsky’s technique involved capturing three separate monochrome photographs of the same scene, each captured...
Photography Knowledge 101: What the Hell is SEPIA?
Ever clicked the sepia button on Aperture, Lightroom, or your favorite photo app and wondered, “What the hell is sepia?” I bet you have. It’s fascinating how many novice and seasoned photographers alike don’t know exactly what Sepia is. So I figured I’d give you all a little bit of cocktail party ammunition to impress...
New York Times Launches Tumblr for Historic Photo Archive
The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called “The Lively Morgue” to breathe new life into items in the newspaper’s photo archive (nicknamed “The Morgue”). Each week they’ll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection. Just how massive? We don’t know. Our best guess is five million to six million...
