Did You Know: Sepia Toning is Named After the Common Cuttlefish
Here’s your interesting photo fact of the day: did you know that sepia toning (when B&W photos are given that distinctive warm tone) is named after the Common Cuttlefish? The scientific name of the species is Sepia officinalis, and the ink produced by the fish was used for sepia toning when the technique first emerged...
PBS Documentary About Ansel Adams
Here’s fantastic documentary film about Ansel Adams that PBS made for the history series American Experience. [...] an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait of this quintessentially American photographer. The documentary weaves together archival footage, photographic images, dramatic readings of the artist’s own writing, and interviews with leading photographers, historians, curators, naturalists, as well as Adams’s...
Arnold Newman and the Birth of the “Environmental Portrait”
Design director Wayne Ford has written up a great piece on the career of American photographer Arnold Newman, who was in the vanguard of the “environmental portrait” movement that emerged in the early 1940s. By this point, [Alexey] Brodovitch — the indirect teacher — was very aware of the young photographers work and his growing...
Life Archive of Photo Enthusiast Being Uploaded to Flickr One Image at a Time
During his lifetime, MIT engineer and businessman Nick DeWolf founded the giant electronic testing company Teradyne and designed more than 300 semiconductor and electronic test systems. In his spare time he was also an avid photography enthusiast, carrying a camera with him at all times. After his death, his son-in-law Steve Lundeen began working to...
Beautiful Music, High ISO
The recent D4 project was a terrific project for the studio, made more so by the company I shared shooting it. Bill Frakes did his usual wonderful sports stills, but also filmed a beautifully evocative video of Istanbul. Take a look at his site, Straw Hat Visuals. Corey Rich once again defies gravity in his...
How US Spy Satellite Photography Worked Before Digital Technology
Ever wonder how the US government managed to capture spy photos with satellites during the Cold War without the help of digital cameras, computers, or wireless transmission? The Atlantic has a fascinating article on the various techniques that were used: From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles...
Starting Off, Looking Back
2012. Twenty years ago, at this time I was headlong into shooting my first cover story for the National Geographic. Lots of clicks downstream from that now, to be sure. (Most of them, blessedly and appropriately, remain unseen. So many bad frames in pursuit of the few worth spending time with.) And changes. Man, is...
Gifts
Round this time of year, I usually send a message to my buddy Bill down at the Geographic about the richly rewarding experience of the passing of time, the accumulation (hopefully) of yet another year of wisdom and experience, the wonder of change, the increasing depth and importance of friendship, not to mention the shooting...
What 5MB of Storage Looked Like in 1956
This photo shows what 5MB of hard drive storage looked like in 1956. The IBM 305 RAMAC hard disk was state of the art, weighed just shy of a ton, required a forklift to be carried around, and was composed of 50 separate 24-inch discs that occupied 16 square feet. The annual cost of using...
Eerie Hidden Mothers in Vintage Photos
Did you know that in vintage tintype photographs of infants mothers were often present in the photo but hidden by a veil? Subjects needed to remain still due to the longer exposure times required back then, so mothers were often asked to hold their children tightly while the portraits were being exposed. It was common...
Photo of a Nuclear Explosion Less than 1 Millisecond After Detonation
This might look like some kind of microscopic organism, but it’s actually a high-speed photograph of a nuclear explosion. It was captured less than 1 millisecond after the detonation using a rapatronic camera, which is capable of exposure times as brief as 10 nanoseconds (one nanosecond is one billionth of a second). The photograph was...
The First Known Light Painting Photos
The first known light painting photographs were made way back in 1914, when Frank and Lillian Moller Gilbreth used small lights and long exposure photos to capture the motion of workers. Subjects ranged from handkerchief folders to bricklayers. The photos weren’t meant as art, but were instead made to help develop ways to increase employee...
