Does it improve my composition and technique? No. But knowing this stuff can be helpful. For example, when I want to shoot a landscape at 70mm and f/5.6 will my corners be sharper with my 24-70 f/2.8 or a 70-200 f/2.8? Or which will have less distortion for an architectural shot (since I hate the resolution loss of correcting distortion in post), my 35mm f/1.4 or my 24-70 zoom at 35mm? (Surprisingly, the answer is my zoom.)

This kind of information is easy to find. DxoMark has nice graphs for each lens that show distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and resolution at various focal lengths and apertures for each lens they test. SLRgear.com has a nice pop-up app that shows the resolution across the field of the lens at various apertures and focal lengths.  The Digital Picture has great pop-ups that let you compare two lenses side-by-side for flare, distortion, vignetting and even images of ISO 12233 crops.

A lot of people use those tools when deciding which lens to buy. I use them after I have the lens so I know how to best use it.

 Resolution Maps

One thing that I’ve started using more frequently in post processing is a resolution map of the lens. We all know that every lens has highest resolution in the center and less in the corners. But the pattern of sharpness is different for different lenses.

Some lenses have a high peak of resolution right in the center that quickly drops off. Others maintain significantly high resolution halfway to the corners and then drop like a rock. Others have a rather linear drop-off from the center to the corners.

Just as an example, below are 6 Imatest charts showing MTF50 of 6 different lenses across the field of view. The absolute resolution numbers aren’t important for this demonstration, rather it’s the pattern of how the resolution changes. For each lens, yellow is the highest MTF50, blue is about 1/3 the value of yellow.

Why Does it Matter?

There are a lot of reasons, of course. But one I use a lot is creating sharpening maks for postprocessing. Like a lot of people, I use a masked layer for sharpening, applying less sharpening to the already sharp center of the image, and more sharpening to the softer areas. Instead of just a generic oval, I try to make a mask that mirrors the resolution map of the lens I’m shooting with.

I keep masks as actions for my most commonly used lenses, which speeds up postprocessing considerably. For example, I’d use something like the first mask, below, for images shot with the lens on the upper left above, and the second mask for middle right lens above.

As an example I’ll use two 100% crops from the left edge of this snapshot.

The crop on the left shows what that edge looks like when I sharpened the entire image to give best center sharpness. The crop on the right was when I used a mask to use stronger sharpening, but only at 50% strength in the center of the image. With either technique the center looked the same, but the edges were quite different.

Of course you can simply use an oval mask and adjust it for each image with a bit of trial and error. But I had 500 vacation photos to go through. Since 75% of them were taken with one lens at the same aperture, saving an action with the appropriate sharpening made that quick and easy.

You don’t need Imatest to figure out the sharpness pattern for the lenses you have. A simple photograph of a flat wall or fence with reasonable detail (bricks or unpainted wood are nice) will let you see where each lens starts to soften and by how much. Once you’ve made a good mask for that lens you have it forever. For most lenses, the same mask can be used at different apertures – you simply reduce the strength of the layer if you’ve shot stopped down. For other lenses, though, like my Zeiss 50mm f/1.4, you will need to make masks for different apertures.

Uwe Steinmueller at OutbackPhoto.net and I have been doing a series of articles trying to show how a little gear head knowledge and a little post-processing knowledge compliment each other and help make better images, and this is a great opportunity for that. Uwe’s article and action for corner sharpening, provide a nice photographic demonstration of how sharpening with a mask improves your end result, and a nice script with an adjustable mask.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

April, 2012

Important aspects of Human Vision

Because we present our work to other people it is important to understand some basic aspects about how we perceive detail.

Human vision works quite differently than our cameras:

• We all know that our eyes adapt to scenes. If it is darker our pupils open and if it gets brighter they close. This process often takes quite a while and is not instant.
• Detail we see is based on contrast (brightness differences)

Contrast

All detail we can see is not based on absolute tonal values but based on contrast. The eye is extremely sensitive to very small brightness changes. This makes the concept of contrast so important.

Global Contrast

Global contrast measures the brightness difference between the darkest and brightest element in the entire image. Tools like Curves and Levels only change global contrast as they treat all pixels with the same brightness levels identical.

The global contrast has three main regions:

• Mid-tones
• Highlights
• Shadows

The sum of the contrast amounts of these three regions defines the global contrast. This means if you spend more global contrast on the mid-tones (very commonly needed) you can spend less global contrast on highlights and shadows at any given global contrast level.

The mid-tones normally show the main subject. If the mid-tones show low contrast the image lacks “snap”. Adding more global contrast to the mid-tones (“snap”) often results in compressed shadows and highlights. Adding some local contrast (see next) can help to improve the overall image presentation.

Good lenses can improve the contrast too. This may not always be welcome if the scene is very contrasty.

Finding the “right” amount of contrast is tricky. Lets show some samples (diagonal split view).

Both show the same image at a different contrast level. The upper right part looks hazy in comparison. But also the comparison is a problematic tool because the more contrasty version will always grab your attention (compare images printed on matte and glossy papers).

Because the more contrasty version grabs your attention does not mean it really looks better. Be careful not to add too much contrast. If you print on matte papers more contrast may actually be a good thing because the print on matte paper will soften the contrast quite a bit.

The image starts to look harsh (upper right). Actually contrast and smoothness (opposite of harshness) need to be balanced. If maximum detail is your goal you may add a bit stronger contrast while other scenes require lower contrast levels. Even very low contrast scenes (e.g. fog) need a certain amount of contrast to look right. Once you add too much contrast you may remove the fog and turn it into a normal low contrast scene.

Local Contrast

The following chart helps to understand the concept of local contrast.

The circles in each row have exactly the identical brightness levels. Yet the top right circle looks a lot brighter than the one on the left. Why is that? Our eyes see the difference to the local surrounding. The right circle looks much brighter with the dark gray background compared to a brighter background on the left. Just the opposite is true for the two circles on the bottom. For our eyes the absolute brightness is of less importance than the relative relation to other close areas.

This effect — called Retinex Theory  — was described in 1971 by Edwin H. Land (founder of Polaroid).

Some of the Basic Lightroom tools and Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight act locally and do not treat all pixels with the same brightness values as identical.

The classic Dodge&Burn also manipulates the local brightness of contrast of images. Dodge&Burn is still one of the top methods to refine images because our own eyes judge how the image is presented to the human eye. In some way modern imaging tools like Lightroom’s Highlights and Shadows reduce the need for manual Dodge&Burn without replacing them. The main local contrast tool in Lightroom is the Clarity tool.

Tools with Global Action

There are some controls in image editing that have ‘global’ action. With global we mean that they treat all pixels equal and only depend on the single pixel value itself. Classic global controls are Levels and Curves (also the Tone Curve in Lightroom).

Tools with Local Action

Often more interesting are tools that act more local. The main tools in of this type in Lightroom are Highlights, Shadows and Clarity.

Local contrast corrections are also not free lunch. They can often add wide halos if used at strong settings. Here is a sample in Lightroom with Clarity set to 100 (10-20 may be more reasonable settings):

Sharpness/Detail

Sharpness is created by local contrast at edges. What is in your way of optimal sharpness?

• Lens contrast: Good lenses really make a major difference
• Lens resolving power
• CA (CA correction costs real resolution)
• Lens distortions (again distortion corrections costs resolution)
• Bayer filter (you can study this by comparing results from the Sigma Foveon cameras)
• Anti Aliasing Filter (blurs the image to avoid moiré and aliasing)
• Camera shake (tripods and good technique can help)
• Sensor resolution: but often the system is limited by not so good lenses
• Sensor noise: hides detail. Stay at lowest ISO if you can.

Nothing lost here can really be recovered. Still good sharpening can give a very much-improved impression by improving the acutance (edge contrast). Sharpening is a balance act:

• Improve acutance
• Avoid artifacts
• Halos
• Stair stepping
• Amplify noise
• Keep smooth surfaces

The following crop from the above image (magnified) shows some halos that would be too strong for our taste:

We think our own Optimal Sharp V3 script for Photoshop helps to improve fine details and yet minimize some of these artifacts. Here is a sample where sharpening with Optimal Sharp V3 makes a major difference:

Fine Detail and Noise

The detail you can get from your system is of course limited by the sensor resolution. The other important factor is noise. At some point it is impossible to distinguish noise from real detail. It may not really matter for grungy scenes (e.g. rust) but in smother areas it does not look good (e.g. the sky in the above building image showed also more noise dues to over sharpening).

Note: in the camera forums we often read that camera X does not show any noise at ISO 800-1600. Not sure what these people are looking for. Noise with top cameras can even be revealed at ISO 100 once you open up the shadows. More truthful would be to say: The images from camera X can still produce usable images at ISO 800-1600. Often taking a picture at ISO 1600 maybe the only way to get the shot. Then we live with the noise but it is still there.

Conclusion

In the end the whole system of camera, lens and post processing defines your result. While a good camera and lens are always the best starting point the processing matters as much. Tuning Contrast (global and local) and sharpening play a central role and have to be well balanced. Also don’t forget that in the end the image content counts and not all our pixel peeping. Don’t forget to have fun with your photography.

Uwe Steinmueller

Digital Outback Photo for Lensrentals.com

March, 2013

My mind is a bad neighborhood – I shouldn’t be left alone there after dark. So the other night I’m driving home home and there’s a truck in front of one of my neighbor’s houses, for this carpet cleaning service, Stanley Steemer. A truly normal person probably wouldn’t notice. A mildly disturbed person might wonder “are they getting ready to sell their house?”

Me? I think, “Why don’t they spell STEAM correctly?” If you read my blog much, you know that spelling isn’t always my strong suit (if they have a typo Olympics, I’m going for gold), so I’m rather triumphant when I find someone else spells worse than I do. Since it was after dark, and no one was home but me, alone in the bad neighborhood that is my brain, I went online and did a little research.

As usual, that research ended up connecting me with a fascinating historical photographer that I had previously known nothing about. I promptly wasted about 8 days of my life reading a number of biographies. How did I get from a carpet cleaning company to the most interesting photographer I’ve ever found? Well, I’ll tell you.

Way back in Maine, circa 1849

The Stanleys, a farming family in Kingfield, Maine, added twin boys to their already large family in 1849. Officially named Francis Edgar and Freelan Oscar, the twins generally went by their initials: F.E. and F.O. The boys were both constant tinkerers. Freelan, for example, wanted a violin as a child, so he and Francis whittled the pieces out of wood and made their own violin. No one is sure how good the first one was, but the Stanleys sold hundreds of violins for many decades. A Stanley violin is today a rare collectors item, worth mega.

The twins both went to Farmington Normal Training School, expecting to become teachers. F.O. actually did, eventually becoming principal in Mechanic Falls, Maine. F.E., though, found teaching didn’t agree with him. He moved to Lewiston and began a career as a portrait photographer in 1874. F. E. was quite a success and had a busy studio.

But for my boy F.E., just being an awesome portrait photographer wasn’t enough. He had to invent stuff, too. In 1876, he patented what is arguably the most important invention in photography since Daguerre invented the camera (6,324,413 models can’t be wrong). Without F.E., millions of soldiers would probably not have bothered taking their pin-ups to overseas, Hugh Heffner might have remained an Esquire copywriter forever, and millions of women would have had to wait until Photoshop was developed to feel inadequate about their looks.

That’s correct — F.E. invented the airbrush and developed techniques to airbrush his photographs.

 Of course, this was 1876, so he wasn’t so much brushing a little cellulite from his centerfold pictures. Rather, he was using it to colorize his black and white photographs.  That was enough to make him his first fortune, though, and fairly soon F.O. joined him in Lewiston and their studio grew into one of the largest in New England.

But Wait, There’s More

Most people, having invented the airbrush and created one of the largest photography – airbrush studios in New England, would probably rest on the laurels a bit, and let the cash roll in. But the Stanley boys just weren’t wired that way. They began to use the new dry plate photography techniques and decided, well, the dry plates being made just weren’t good enough.

Here they were, basically painting over their photographs with an airbrush, but they were worried about having the best quality film they could get. This is how I know these guys were really photographers. Who else would obsess about having the highest possible quality image before they began manipulating and distorting it until it lost all relationship with reality?

Anyway, being the Stanley Brothers, they began making their own dry plates. Then, in 1884 they patented a machine for coating mass-produced quantities of dry plates and relocated their newly incorporated Stanley Dry Plate Company to Watertown, Massachusetts. I guess since they were originally from Maine, this was like retiring to the Sunny South for them. By the 1890s they were selling nearly $1,000,000 worth of dry plates a year. Another decade, another fortune.

Leaving Photography at High Speed

The Stanley brothers seem to get distracted easily. In the 1890s, if you were an inventive type seeking distraction, there was probably nothing calling to you louder than the new concept of the horseless carriage. F. E. became rather obsessed with the idea and began constructing his own horseless carriages as a hobby. Internal combustion engines were being used for most of these newfangled motorcars, but F. E. felt that good old reliable steam engines were a better idea.

By 1898, the Stanley Brothers were exhibiting the first Stanley Steamer automobile — and copyrighted the name Stanley Steamer. Which is probably why the carpet cleaning company has to spell steam s-t-e-e-m. They also decided to sell their dry plate business to rival firm Eastman Kodak, so the brothers made another fortune.

If you’re like me, you may have assumed the Stanley Steamer was some crude locomotive-looking thing with 4 wheels. The first prototype may have been, but the Stanleys eventually developed steam engines weighing only 125 pounds or so, which were actually smaller than the internal combustion engines used on other horseless carriages.

Their cars also performed like nobody’s business. Their 1898 model had a top speed of 27 miles per hour (dangerously fast for the day). Steam engines have very high torque and the first Stanley Steamer could climb a 30-degree grade, something no other car of the time could do. Steamers were nearly noiseless (very different from internal combustion engines of the day), didn’t require a cooling system, had almost no exhaust, and were much more reliable than gasoline engines.

Stanley Steamers, at the turn of the century, were lapping the pack as far as automobiles went. The Stanley Steamer Rocket utilized aerodynamic principles way back in 1906. It set the land speed record of 127.7 miles per hour at Ormond Beach in 1906. In 1907, it briefly reached 150 miles per hour. Immediately afterwards, it went through an uneven patch of sand and became airborne.

To demonstrate just how far ahead of it’s time the Steamer was, during its 100 or so feet of airborne travel, it unofficially set the air speed record, too. Airplanes wouldn’t approach this speed for a decade.

Stanley Steamer Rocket, 1906 - www.curbsideclassic.com

They Stanley brothers were not only great inventors; they were also good businessmen. In 1899, John B. Walker wanted to buy the Stanley Steamer Company. The brothers named an exorbitant price for a company with one working prototype car: $250,000. Walker paid it, as long as the brothers agreed to not compete with him for a year. By 1903, the brothers bought the company back for $20,000 and continued to make Stanley Steamers until the 1920s.

Oh, and One More Thing

F.E. Stanley died in 1918 when the Stanley Steamer he was driving slid off of a rain-slick road. F.O. Stanley contracted tuberculosis in 1903 and his doctors advocated he move west to high altitude, although they felt even then he would only live a few years.

F.O. loved a remote location called Estes Park, Colorado. At the time, Estes Park was considered largely inaccessible. F.O., though, had a Stanley Steamer, with its remarkable hill climbing ability, and he could reach Estes Park easily. He bought 140 acres there, and built a home for himself as well as a luxury hotel for guests and friends from the east coast.

For several years, the only way to reach the Stanley Hotel was by a fleet of 13 Stanley Steamer 13-person carriages. It was immensely popular, though, and remains so to this day. You have probably know the Stanley Hotel, by the way. Stephen King wrote The Shining after spending a night there, and it was the setting for the movie of the same name.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

January, 2013

REFERENCES

Alef, Daniel: The Stanley Brothers. Their Steamer was Fast and Environmentally Friendly. Kindle Books, 2009.

Atkinson, Bruce: The Remarkable F. O. Stanley. http://bruceatkinson.com/stanley/co-life-stanley.html

Carey, Charles: American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries. Facts on File Books, NY, 2002.

Foster, Kit: The Stanley Steamer. Stanley Museum, Inc. 2004.

McNessor, Mike: Francis E. Stanley. Hemmings Classic Car, December, 2005.

Stanley Brothers Patents: Stanleymotorcarriage.com: http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/patents/FE%20&%20FO%20Stanley%20Patents.htm

I hear this about 20 times a day and it’s true: “Yes, it has a lot of distortion, but that’s easy to correct in post.” It’s a totally true statement.

Unfortunately, way too often, the complete statement goes like this: “I got it because it has such high resolution. Yes, it has a lot of distortion, but that’s easy to correct in post.” That’s two totally true statements. But when combined, they become false.

Distortion correction is a wonderful tool. But every tool, whether in-camera or in your post-processing program, that modifies an image is a trade off of sorts. There is no way you can shift that many pixels around and not decrease resolution. I’ve said it dozens of times. Yesterday, unfortunately, someone asked me to tell him exactly how much resolution you actually lose?

Don’t you just hate it when someone interrupts your Rant of Absolute Knowledge by asking for facts? What a buzz kill. Now, if I were hanging out on a forum under my anonymous handle of LensGuruGod1 I could have used proper Internet etiquette and replied, “If you weren’t an awful photographer you’d already know that. I won’t waste my time with you anymore.”

Being that I was out there using my real name and all, the comment left me no choice. I had to go do some testing and gather some actual facts. I hate when that happens, especially when I’ve already spent two days playing with the Canon 24-70 f/4 IS and taking it apart. That has me a bit behind on my real job, so please excuse that this isn’t an exhaustive test of 30 different lenses. I do think, though, it’s a good example.

The Test

I used the Canon 24-105 f/4 IS for this test. It has a large amount of barrel distortion at 24mm (over 4%). I chose it simply because we already had Imatest set up at 24mm and because I feel our Imatest setup is a bit less accurate wider than 16mm. I mention this only as a preemptive strike because I’m 100% certain some Fanboy is going to be saying, “Roger said the Canon 24-105 has the worst barrel distortion of any lens.” It doesn’t, not by a long shot, but it has plenty for this test.

We usually run Imatest only on RAW files, but that would make it impossible to correct the image. So I took the RAW file to Photoshop, turned off every single sharpening and modifying tool and converted it to TIFF. Then I loaded the correction profiles for the Canon 5D Mk II and 24-105 and did an auto distortion correction, saving that as a TIFF.

Finally, I compared the corrected and uncorrected versions in Imatest. I’m presenting data from one lens here, but I did another for completeness. It was identical.

Image Correction

Below are the original and corrected shots. Photoshop does a really nice job of correcting the image. I measured the autocorrected version as carefully as I could and barrel distortion had been reduced from 4.2% to 0.5%.

The Imatest Results

On top is the Imatest printout of the uncorrected image. Below is the corrected image. The numbers in the boxes are the MTF50 measured in Line Pairs / Image Height at each location.

The numbers are a bit hard to read, so I’ll summarize. The center MTF50 dropped from 1068 LP/IH to 939 (88% as sharp) after distortion correction. The far sides from an average of 556 to 477 (86%), while the corners decreased from an average of 539 to 460 (85%). Actually I was a bit surprised, expecting more decrease in the corners and less in the center.

I reran the numbers for MTF20 which decreased in the center from 1552 to 1450  LP/IH (93.5%), on the edges it dropped from 1015 to 838 (83%), and in the corners from 1005 LP / IF to 837 LP / IF (83%) which is more like what I expected.

Since MTF20 probably is a more important measurement of resolution for small prints and online jpgs, this would probably correlate more with what most people would see in an image. Landscape photographers making large prints, though, would be interested in MTF50.

So What Does it Mean?

Not a lot for most people. Distortion correction generally improves the look of a photograph and a small sacrifice in resolution isn’t too important with today’s cameras and lenses, even in the corners.

But when someone wants to argue that they buy a lens with high distortion because it has higher resolution and distortion is easy to fix in post . . . well, it had better be a lot higher, or it’s a fool’s argument.

I’ll add one other note. It’s well known among lens designers (I’m not one, but I read their textbooks and journals) that when designing a lens correcting distortion often reduces resolution. In ancient times (i.e. film days) distortion correction was a first priority. After all, it’s really hard to stretch film to correct distortion. In current times, lens designers seem to be more willing to leave the distortion to get higher resolution.

I agree with that – I’d rather have the option of correcting or not correcting myself. But I think it’s important for photographers who ARE very interested in the best resolution to realize they’ll be giving some of that back when they correct in post. If two lenses have identical resolution in testing but one has more distortion, that one will have less resolution after the distortion is corrected.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

January, 2013

Note: For those offended by such things, there is a small photograph reproduced below that has artistic nudity. 

You’re probably familiar with the film-buff game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If not, basically you name any individual who is associated with movies and you should be able to connect that person to Kevin Bacon using no more than six individuals (usually less). It’s even built into Google’s search engine, you simply type “Bacon number” followed by the person’s name. For example, Barack Obama’s Bacon number is two: Obama and Tom Hanks are in The Road We Travelled, Hanks and Bacon were both in Apollo 13.

If you’re a photo history buff, you can do the same thing with Charles Darwin for almost any photographer of significance in 19th century photography. For example, Chevalier, who made the lenses for the original Daguerrotype camera, has a Darwin number of 4: Chevalier made lenses for Daguerre. Sir John Hershel showed Daguerre how to make his images more permanent using sodium thiosulfate. Sir John and Darwin worked together advocating Darwin’s Theory or Evolution and Darwin refers to him in the opening line of The Origin of Species. Similarly, Sir Humphrey Davy has a Darwin number of 2: Darwin’s Uncle was Thomas Wedgewood, who along with Sir Humphrey Davy, made the very first images.

It may seem surprising at first, but really it’s not. Darwin probably had his portrait taken by every well known photographer of the day. He made even more connections to the photography world because it was Darwin who largely legitimized photographs as the documentation and illustration for scientific books. Before that time, a well recognized scientist was expected to provide excellent drawings or engravings for his publications. Photographs were used to document places and scenes, but infrequently for scientific work.

Darwin chose to use photographs for the documentation of his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872. He had many reasons for doing so, but probably first among these were that one of his more respected adversaries, Professor Agassiz, planned to use photographs in a book refuting evolution. Agassiz massively shot himself in the foot on that plan, as we’ll discuss in a bit, but Darwin still liked the idea.

The best part, though, is the story of one photograph in the book, and the photographer who made it. The photographer, oddly enough, was Oscar Rejlander who was quite controversial in the day because he heavily modified his negatives to achieve the artistic effect he sought in his prints. That Darwin would choose him as the primary photographer documenting a scientific book was surprising. That Rejlander played a joke on the photography world while doing so should not have come as a surprise at all.

Darwin’s Antagonist

Darwin’s theories still are criticized by a few people today (Which we aren’t going to do in the comments of this article, OK?). In the 1860s, though, the criticism was constant, personal, and strident. In an era when gentlemen usually politely disagreed with their ‘respected opponents’, the evolution debate was more like a Fanboy argument in an online forum. Critiques were vindictive, pointed, and used facts only when personal insults weren’t available.

One of the main opponents of evolution was Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz. One of the more famous scientists of the time, he was a geologist, paleontologist, and biologist. He had issued the authoritative Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classification of all genus and species, and was the first scientist to recognize the past ice ages of the earth. Despite their difference of opinion, Darwin respected him as a scientist.

Agassiz did not argue that Darwin’s observations regarding differences in species were wrong, he accepted those as fact. He believed, however, that the Creator had formed each species ideally for its environment and this, not evolution, accounted for the differences Darwin had observed. Agassiz had also observed that when animals breed outside their species, the offspring are often either sterile, like mules, or could not find a mate because they looked different. (This happens with various species of butterflies, for example.) For this reason, he felt evolution as theorized by Darwin was impossible.

His arguments were persuasive, and he convinced a wealthy Bostonian businessman, Nathanial Thayer, to fund an expedition to document the thousands of animal species in the Amazon basin. He thought he could demonstrate theses species had not changed over the ages, proving evolution false, and planned to use photography to document his observations.

Agassiz did superb scientific work on the Thayer expedition, cataloging some 34,000 specimens. The photography aspect, though, contained some pretty bizarre stuff. Agassiz took hundreds of pictures, most of native women’s breasts. He then compared these to the breasts of fine Greek and Roman statuary, claiming he could determine race on this basis (1, 2, 3, 4).

Needless to say, his book A Journey in Brazil, was not the evolution killer he had promised. The photographic documentation that had interested Darwin never appeared. The images, apparently lost for decades, are kept locked in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography today, and few of the images have ever ben released.

Darwin’s Photographs

Darwin had become fascinated by the fact that ”…the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.” He felt the experession of emotions represented instincts, and that these instincts might be similar between humans and various animals. Having heard about Agassiv’s plan to use photographs for documenting his book, Darwin wanted to do the same thing for The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin spent years collecting and studying photographs and paintings of the various emotions. He corresponded at length with zookeepers, photographers, illustrators, and even the directors of mental institutions (he felt mental patients exhibited ‘unrestrained emotions’ that would make good examples), obtaining photographs and illustrations to use in his book. He did obtain several usable photographs, and, of course, a lot of connections with the photographic community that help make 6 Degrees of Darwin so easy to play.

Among the most interesting were photographs taken by French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne (who discovered among many other things the type of muscular dystrophy named after him). Duchenne had discovered that by applying small electrical currents over the muscles of the face, he could create any type of facial expression.

While this type of human experimentation would be rather unnaceptable today, Duchenne assures us the subjects felt ‘only the slightest discomfort.’ Duchenne’s method, in addition to obtaining whatever expression one wished to reproduce, would maintain that expression for as long as the current was applied. This was an important benefit in an era when taking a photograph required several seconds of exposure.

Darwin was quite pleased to have such good photographs of emotion, but felt that, even in his day, people might just be just a bit distracted by the electrodes and wires in the photographs. After all, the book was discussing the expression of spontaneous emotions and the photos above don’t look all that spontaneous. Darwin finally decided it might be better to make them engravings and leave out the electrodes and stuff.

Darwin also used engravings for most of the animal expressions in the book. That’s understandable since trying to get an animal to hold an expression for a 2 or 3 second exposure isn’t too likely. Unless the expression is ‘asleep.’

I suppose he could have asked Duchenne to do his electrode thing with some animals. I get tickled just thinking what the lab would have looked like, oh, about 30 seconds after he decided to apply that current to a gorilla.

But less than a year before publication, Darwin still did not have what he felt were acceptable photographs to illustrate most human emotions. He discussed the project with a number of the day’s photographers, but they weren’t able to deliver the results he wanted.

Thence Came Rejlander

In 1871 Darwin settled on the well-known photographer, Oscar Rejlander, to obtain photographs for the remaining illustrations. The connection between Darwin and Rejlander was obvious. Darwin often visited photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and considered her a good friend. Cameron was a student of Rejlander’s and recommended him.

The choice, though, seems rather odd because Rejlander was known as an ‘artistic’ photographer who posed and modified his images. Critics of the day felt photographic images should be ‘straight from the camera.’ Rejlander strongly disagreed. He felt photography was art and any means that allowed artistic expression was fair.

His most widely known photograph,Two Ways of Life, had been denied exhibition at the Photographic Society of Scotland because they considered it a false photograph — the print was made by superimposing around 30 negatives. The draperies, for example, are actually the edges of a tablecloth in his studio.

His best selling photograph, Poor Jo, seemed to be a spontaneous photograph of a homeless child in London. It actually was a staged photo of a model taken on the stairs in Rejlander’s studio.

By the late 1860s, Rejlander’s reputation had suffered under the constant criticism. He maintained good cheer and worked diligently, but his images no longer sold well and he was struggling financially.

But he had worked for some years capturing emotional expressions, especially of children, so he had a large number of stock photos already available as examples. There was also the fact that Rejlander was exceptionally good and Darwin had publication deadlines approaching.

The bottom line is Rejlander delivered and the book contains a number of is images, demonstrating exactly the emotions Darwin wanted demonstrated. In fact, 19 of the 30 photographs in the book are by Rejlander. Several of them are actually self-portraits of Rejlander acting out various emotions.

Rejlander’s images were critically acclaimed and the publicity the book brought him helped him stay solvent in his few remaining years (he died in 1875). Actually, the images were more successful than the book. Rejlander sold over 100,000 prints of the images he made for the book, compared to the 7,000 books sold in the first edition.

Ginx’s Baby

On of Rejlander’s images, in particular, generated rave reviews. It illustrates a crying child and was hailed as one of the first “momentary” images ever made. Critics, including many who had been unkind about Rejlander’s work, raved about the amazing quality of this image.

The picture became so famous that Rejlander sold thousands of prints in different formats, making it his most profitable photograph, ever. Part of the reason for the fame was another book, Ginx’s Baby. His Birth and other Misfortunes: A Satire by Edward Jenkins. The book was immensely popular at the time and Rejlander’s photograph appeared on the cover of some versions of it.

Rejlander, ever the jokester, later mimicked the picture showing that really laughing and crying were very little different. He even made a stereoscopic card of himself next to the picture, making a similar expression of either laughing or crying, which he sent to Darwin.

Rejlander made another double print near the end of his life, Rejlander Introducing Mr. Rejlander. The images show him on the right standing in front of an easel pointing to himself on the left dressed in the uniform of the Artist’s Rifles, a volunteer military brigade of which he was a proud member (he asked to be buried in his uniform).

But there’s a bit more to it. The Rejlander standing on the right is wearing the same clothing  he did when posing for some of the images in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The easel behind him is displaying Ginx’s Baby. If you look carefully, you’ll notice ‘military’ Rejlander is standing on the same steps used in his posed photograph Poor Jo.

Rejlander seems to be celebrating his two best selling images. But it turns out there was a bit more to it than that. Just as Poor Jo was an image supposedly showing a homeless child in London, it turns out Ginx’s child is an image supposedly showing a photograph.

The original photograph, maintained in Darwin’s archives, was taken from a further distance and the child is much smaller in proportion to the image. In all likelihood, Rejlander had to use a fairly wide angle lens to get a short enough exposure time. Cropping the image for the Heliotype process used for the book would have left it lacking significant detail.

Rejlander was a trained artist and draftsman. He apparently used a technique he’d used several times in the past: he taped the image to an otherwise blacked out window, put his view camera in front of it, and used the camera’s lens to project the image on a paper. He then outlined the projected photograph, filled in the outline with chalk, and finally took a close-up photograph of the resulting painting.

The image remains true to life, although Rejlander added a chair rather than the toddler-holder-on-a-table seen in the original photograph. Darwin’s notes show clearly that Rejlander had sent the final image labelled ‘photograph of chalk drawing.’ A few early copies of the book contained the original unretouched photograph, but the vast majority have the photograph of the drawing. It has been speculated that the original image reproduced so badly that the photo-drawing was substituted for it very quickly. In either case, however, the text in the book labels the image as a photograph.

This may have been an accident oversight following the change, or simply Darwin’s judgement call (he felt the drawing was faithful to the photograph), or the publisher not wanting to reprint the text associated with the photograph. But whatever the reason, the image was clearly labeled as a photograph in the book and neither Darwin nor Rejlander corrected any of the many rave reviews of the image that occurred after the book’s release.

Certainly Rejlander, who had received so much criticism for his ‘obviously retouched and staged’ photographs probably loved the fact that the critics didn’t have any questions of the authenticity of this image. And it was also incredibly well done. The original chalk drawing was in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society for years and was labelled as a hand-coloured photograph. If not for the original image and final images labelled as ‘photograph of chalk drawing’ being found in Darwin’s archives, it might never have been discovered.

It should also be noted that Rejlander became ill soon after the book was published and died just a few years later. Being unable to work and making significant money for the first time in his life, one can understand he was not too eager to correct the public’s perception that it was an actual photograph.

I wonder, though, if his Rejlander introducing Rejlander photograph was his way of leaving a message for the critics when they finally discovered the truth.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

November, 2012

Note: If you don’t mind reading some 1860s prose, Rejlander’s article linked below is a marvelous defense of art in photography.

Other References:

Rejlander, Oscar: An Apology for Art Photography. Read at a meeting of the South London Photographic Society, 1863.

http://www.psiquifotos.com/2009/04/56-el-ginxs-baby-de-reijlander-y-darwin.html

Prodger, P. Darwin’s Camera. Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution.Oxford University Press. 2008

Lenoir, Timothy: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Stanford University Press. 1998.

“I am going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again.”   Edward Muggeridge

I love writing about great photographers. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but in general they tend to be among the oddest and most interesting groups of people on the planet. I thought the photographer who did post-processing in the 1860s was amazing. I was totally entertained by the life of the hard-drinking New Zealander who took the first telephoto photographs. Not to mention the half-dozen figures that dominated the early days of camera development.

But I’ve never found one that met my double criteria of being both a landmark in photography and being a totally bizarre human being more than today’s subject.

He had successful careers as a bookseller, landscape photographer, travel photographer, academic and scientific photographer, and patented numerous inventions. His early work in Yosemite and the American West became one of Ansel Adam’s inspirations. His later work revolutionized the way things were painted and sculpted. He is considered both the first scientific photographer and the first cinematographer (Important to me because I enjoy tormenting the video techs with frequent lectures about cinematography being a minor branch of photography).

In Britain, plaques at the Royal Photographic Society, the British Film Institute, and Kingston Museum honor him. He was honored as one of the 4 ‘pioneers of communication’ by the U. S. Postal Service, and by exhibits at the Smithsonian Institute. He is also honored by plaques and statues at Stanford University, which he would certainly hate to know about.

He was also the subject of two plays, numerous biographies, two motion pictures, and even an opera. Director Mark Neal filmed U2′s music video “Lemon” as a tribute to his work. Most recently, he became one of only two photographers (that I’m aware of) to have a day as a “Google Doodle.”  He’s also one of only two photographers that I know of to be the subject of a historical novel (the other was Phillipe Halsman).

His work certainly deserved all of the accolades, but, as we say in the South, he “weren’t quite right.”  He murdered his wife’s lover in front of witnesses and was quite surprised that people didn’t understand it was the right thing to do. He sued arguably the richest man in the world multiple times and later claimed Thomas Edison stole his ideas. He took a college professorship to photograph moving animals and then decided since humans were animals he should take photographs of undressed ladies moving around. He died (according to legend) naked while digging a scale model of the Great Lakes in his back yard.

In other words, he was the perfect subject for one of my blog posts. But I should warn you: this one is a bit of a long read.

“The man is insane. A genius, but completely insane.”  Thomas Edison discussing Eadweard Muybridge in the historical novel Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadweard Muybridge.

“I would hesitate to call him a thief but that will do until I can think of a more apt description.”  Eadweard Muybridge regarding Thomas Edison in the historical novel Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadweard Muybridge.

Edward Muggeridge

Edward James Muggeridge was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1830. He had a middle class upbringing as the son of a fairly successful coal and grain merchant. He emigrated to the United States at age 25, eventually making his way to San Francisco where he opened a successful bookstore. He shared a building with popular photographer Silas Selleck and also began selling engravings and photographic prints.

In 1860 he sold the store to his brother and planned a trip to England and Europe to buy more books. He took the Butterfield Overland Stage to New York, but during the trip the stagecoach crashed. One passenger was killed and Muggeridge badly injured. He was in a coma for 9 days and obviously had a significant brain injury, having double vision, seizures, and losing his senses of taste and smell for months after the accident.

Although it wasn’t recognized at the time, the description of his symptoms would today be considered to indicate injury to the frontal cortex of the brain. This might have led to some of the poor emotional control and eccentric behavior Muybridge exhibited throughout his later life.

He completed his recovery back in England and decided to stay there for a bit, since the American Civil War had broken out at the time. He apparently learned, or began practicing, photography during his time in England, since he is known to have exhibited photographs at the Great London Exhibition of 1862. He was busy in other ways, too, obtaining patents for a new type of washing machine and a printing plate. He apparently made quite a bit of money, then lost it all in the English banking crisis of 1865.

During this time he also changed his name from Muggeridge to Maybridge and then Muybridge.

Early Photography

Muybridge returned to the U. S in 1866, living in San Francisco and listing himself as Edward Muybridge, Photographer. He concentrated on landscapes, converting a wagon into a portable darkroom. He made large prints, picture albums, and stereographs which all sold well.

His reputation was made in the late 1860s when his large views of Yosemite Valley became published. Unlike the romantic photographers of the day, who emphasized soft, misty views, Muybridge attempted to create sharp detailed images. His style was emulated by later Western landscape photographers like Paul Strand and Ansel Adams.

Muybridge’s landscapes differed from others of the day in their very realistic skies and cloud formations. Muybridge is arguably credited as the first photographer to use a split neutral density filter in his landscape work to avoid overexposing the sky. The truth is, though, that Muybridge also kept a large stack of cloud and sky negatives in his darkroom. If the sky was blown out of a photograph he just placed a nice sky-and-cloud negative behind it when he made his final prints. Truly, the man was ahead of his time.

Muybridge was also known to be rather obsessive and something of a daredevil. His photographs of Yosemite and other Western landscapes often show locations other photographers never saw. Muybridge travelled into areas considered to inaccessible or too dangerous by other photographers and often shot from locations like ledges along cliff edges. His assistants of that time recall lowering Muybridge and his heavy view cameras on ropes over cliffs so he could get exactly the shot he wanted.

The U. S. and California governments hired him for several projects. In 1867, the United States bought the Alaskan Territory from Russia for 7.2 million dollars. The decision was widely unpopular before the discovery of gold in Alaska and most Americans thought of Alaska as a frozen wasteland. The government hired Muybridge to photograph Alaska and his images were widely circulated to support the idea that Alaska contained valuable and interesting real estate.

He also photographed the Modoc Indian war for the U. S. Army. Other than photographs of campsites and tents, there was little with which to meet the demand for images of the ‘war,’ which involved about 50 Native Americans who fought 500 cavalrymen for 6 months. Muybridge used a little creative license, getting the Army’s Indian scouts to pose and later labeling the images “Modoc braves awaiting in ambush.”

Muybridge was very well known by 1870, although by a slightly different name.  He changed it one final time, from Edward to Eadweard, because he felt an affinity for the ancient English Kings who spelled their name that way. But he signed his photographs “Helios”, the god of light.

His landscapes were sold all over the world. His photographs of San Francisco, including some of the earliest panoramas, were extremely popular. He was hired by San Francisco’s many millionaires to photograph their magnificent new homes and families. If his career had ended then, he would still be discussed today as one of the better photographers of the era. But Eadweard was just getting started.

Muybridge and Stanford

Being one of the premier photographers in the San Francisco area, it isn’t surprising that Muybridge took commissions from Leland Stanford. Stanford had made a fortune as a merchant during the California gold rush, become Governor of California, and was majority owner of the Central Pacific Railroad (the Western half of the first transcontinental railroad). Muybridge was hired to photograph two of Stanford’s homes, as well as his family.

To keep himself from getting bored when he wasn’t busy completing his plans for world domination, Stanford had a large horse-breeding ranch (the location is Palo Alto, California today). Stanford was interested in the gait of the horse, and particularly in one of the unanswered questions of the day: whether all 4 hooves were ever off of the ground at the same time.

Stanford told Muybridge to take pictures of his horses running to demonstrate if the hooves ever all left the ground. When Muybridge explained that the cameras of the day couldn’t possibly take such a short exposure, Stanford, offered him $2,000, an unlimited expense account, and the assistance of a couple of engineers. Muybridge decided that perhaps it could be done after all.

There is an urban legend that Stanford had made a $25,000 bet regarding this, but the truth is he had read Étienne-Jules Marey’s book Animal Mechanism, which suggested a photograph could be made of a horse running, and that it would show all 4 feet off of the ground at once. At any rate, Stanford’s expenses for the project totaled over $50,000, so he would still have lost money even if he had won such a bet.

Today, the concept of ‘stop-action’ photography is taken for granted. In those days, photographers timed their exposures using their hat to cover and uncover the lens while they counted “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi.” The idea of exposures lasting a fraction of a second was unheard of.

Muybridge designed a simple wooden shutter that would allow short exposure times. He also experimented with different chemical combinations for both plates and developers that were more light sensitive, used white sheets and reflectors to maximize the available light, and only photographed on sunny summer days. In late 1872 or early 1873 (there is some disagreement on the exact date) he was able to make a rather blurry silhouette photograph of Stanford’s trotter ‘Occident’ that showed all 4 feet off of the ground.

Stanford and Muybridge claimed success, but there is significant controversy. No negatives exist and the positives seem to indicate a photograph of a painting of a running horse. It has since been said that Muybridge projected the blurry original negative through a magic lantern, had a local artist paint the projection onto a canvas, and then photographed the panted canvas to make his final print. It makes a little Photoshop manipulation seem rather benign, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, this photograph vaulted Muybridge from well-recognized landscape photographer to national fame as someone who was taking photographs of things never seen before. Newspapers across the country published engravings of his photograph, and with few exceptions praised the work. There would be an interruption, however, before Muybridge could capitalize on his new fame.

The Murderous Photographer

While Muybridge’s professional life was doing well in the mid 1870′s, his personal life was not. Muybridge had reached his mid-forties still a bachelor. This is probably not too surprising, since in California there were 10 males for every female.

In 1871, however, he met a much younger woman, Flora Shallcross Stone, who was working as a shop girl. Muybridge, although much older, was well known and well to do. Flora was all over him like Salmonella on warm chicken. Despite the misgivings of his friends (Flora had a ‘colorful’ past and at 21 was already a divorcee, something quite rare in those days) they were married in 1872.

Muybridge spent several months traveling throughout the wilderness each year on various photographic assignments. During his absences Flora was escorted to various plays and concerts by a local drama critic, Harry Larkyns.

When Flora gave birth to their first child in 1874, Muybridge was overjoyed. Some months later, however, the midwife who attended the birth told Muybridge the child was not his and produced as evidence several letters Flora had written to Larkyns, professing her love and telling Larkyns her child was really his.

Muybridge calmly walked to his studio, loaded one of the guns he carried on his many trips into the wilderness, took a ferryboat across the bay, and hired a coach to drive him to a mining camp where Larkyn was working. In front of a dozen witnesses playing poker, Muybridge walked up to Larkyns, said, “Good evening. My name is Muybridge. I have a message for you from my wife.” and shot him. Larkyns died instantly. Muybridge handed his gun to the innkeeper, apologized to the card players for interrupting their game, and sat calmly until he was arrested.

Muybridge’s lawyers, apparently hired by Stanford, presented a plea of insanity and called multiple witnesses who testified about Muybridge’s strange behavior and ‘fits’ since his stagecoach accident. Apparently Muybridge became somewhat offended by this talk of insanity, insisted on taking the stand himself, and told the jury he was not insane. To put a little icing on the cake, he added that if given the opportunity, he would kill Larkyns again. (Personally, I think if you’re facing a death sentence, your lawyers enter an insanity plea, and you then tell the jury you aren’t insane — well, you are.)

Somewhat in desperation after Muybridge nuked his own insanity defense, Pendergast turned to his considerable oratory skills. Realizing the jury was made up of 12 middle-aged married men who had lived most of their life in the Wild West, Pendergast made no apologies for the murder. Instead, in his closing arguments, he asked the jury to consider a higher law than the laws of California: the laws of human nature. His closing arguments concluded:

“I cannot ask you to send this man forth to family and home—he has none . . . . But I do ask you to send him forth free—let him take up the thread of his broken life, and resume that profession on which his genius had shed so much luster—the profession which is now his only love. Let him go forth into the green fields, by the bright waters, through the beautiful valleys, and up and down the swelling coast, and in the active work of the magic of his art, he may gain ‘surcease of sorrow’ and pass on to his allotted end in comparative peace.”

It was reported that those in the courtroom gave a standing ovation at the end of Pendergast’s speech, and that many in attendance openly wept.

The judge then instructed the jury that Muybridge could only be found either guilty, or innocent by reason of insanity. He then reminded them that Muybridge himself had said he was not insane. The jury promptly returned a verdict of not guilty, because it was a justified killing,  a verdict never used since in California (I’m told that the closely related ‘he needed killin’ verdict is used with some frequency in Texas, however).

Muybridge left the country almost immediately, photographing Central America for a steamship line that wanted to publicize their destination. He and Flora had a contentious legal battle over whether she should receive alimony in their divorce, which ended when she died suddenly at age 24. I’ve watched enough crime TV to think if a 24 year old dies suddenly from unknown causes while divorcing a man who works every day with toxic chemicals . . . but apparently no one else thought it odd.

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, during the Central American trip Muybridge would make nearly his last, and possibly his best, landscape work. Even by today’s standards, his signature cloudy skies are still awesome.

How Horses Moved, Part 2

When Muybridge returned from Central America, Stanford wanted him to improve on the photographs of moving horses he’d done in 1873.  This time he wanted a series of photographs, taken sequentially; every few feet as the horses ran buy.

Muybridge helped design the track where the photographs would be made, using lime to whiten the track itself; having a large, whitewashed wall the horses would run in front of; and using markers to show the distance travelled with each photograph. He experimented with his chemicals, creating an ammonia-based developer that would work on images with minimal exposures. He modified stereo cameras so that two lenses exposed each plate, doubling the amount of light for each shot.

With help from Stanford’s engineers, he devised a mechanical shutter using two pieces of wood tripped by a string the horse broke as it ran past. Unfortunately, the horses, being suspicious creatures with excellent eyesight, would often come to a complete stop at the first string. When they did finally get a horse to run through the strings, they were as likely to pull the expensive cameras over as to trip the mechanical shutters.

Muybridge and another of Stanford’s engineers, John Isaacs, developed electro-magnetic shutters. Finally, in 1877 and 1878, Muybridge was able to obtain a series of exposures of Stanford’s horse ‘Sallie Gardner’ at full gallop. They arranged demonstrations for local reporters who watched Stanford expose and develop the images, making sure this time there were no questions about the reality of their photographs.

Today, it’s hard for us to understand the impact these images had. They demonstrated something that had never been seen before, a still image of a rapidly moving creature. The first images taken from a microscope or telescope may have come close, but those didn’t show something people saw every day the way Muybridge’s photographs did. The results were reported in papers around the world, in Scientific American, and in La Nature, the French journal of science.

For the first time, photography was being used to advance and document scientific research. To complete the circle,  Étienne-Jules Marey’s wrote to Muybridge and Stanford, congratulating them and making suggestions for further work. (Marey himself would later contribute several inventions to stop-motion photography.)

Muybridge took the work a step further, beginning stop-motion photographs of other animals and people. He also developed a slightly different technique using multiple cameras to photograph the subject form various angles in a circle. He called these fore shortenings, but we know them as freeze-motion shots or the ‘Matrix effect’.

He also invented what he called a zoopraxiscope, which placed a series of images on the outside of a glass disk that was then spun in front of a projecting magic lantern. The result was a repeating clip of a second or two’s length, showing the animal’s actual motion.

He demonstrated this device to Thomas Edison in 1888, which some said inspired Edison to invent the Kinetoscope, the earliest motion picture device. That may or may not be, but Edison filed his first ‘caveat,’ or intention to patent a motion picture device, soon after he saw Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. And just to close the circle once again, Mayer, who started all of this with his suggestion of stop-motion photography, had himself invented a ‘chronographic gun,’ capable of taking twelve frames per second. Edison visited Mayer in 1889, and immediately after returning to the U. S. filed another ‘caveat’ for a motion picture camera.

Coincidence? Probably not. But Karma’s a bitch and Edison forgot to, or didn’t think to, file patents in other countries. This allowed the Lumiere brothers and others to perfect motion picture projection and refine motion picture cameras in Europe.

The Great Falling Out

Muybridge began a lecture tour in 1880 that took him through the U. S. and Europe. In 1882, while lecturing in London and discussing obtaining long-term support from the Royal Society, his career hit another bump. Stanford and D. J. Stillman published “The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography.” The book contained drawings of the photographs Muybridge had taken, but gave him absolutely no credit. Stanford considered Muybridge a hired technician and since he had not used the actual photographs saw no reason to include him as an author.

The effect on Muybridge’s career was profound. The Royal Society withdrew their offer, fearing that Muybridge had not really done the work he claimed. Muybridge sued both Stanford and the publisher. In Muybridge fashion, however, he lost both lawsuits largely because he claimed credit for everything to do with the project and lost credibility. He never forgave Stanford, though, and made references to him in lectures and publications for years.

Muybridge landed on his feet, however, taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania who set up a lab for him to continue his work on scientific photography of animals and humans in motion. They set up a committee of 9 Academics to oversee the work and make certain it remained scientific, but also realized the work would aid artists in their drawings and paintings.

Muybridge was prolific. He photographed birds in flight and almost every available animal moving at different gaits. Photographs of humans demonstrated the gaits of various diseases for medical training, athletes in motion, and hundreds of nude models in various movements. In total he made almost 100,000 images that appeared in a number of books.

The first, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, was published in 11 volumes containing 20,000 images. It instantly became a classic reference for artists and scientists alike.

Perhaps the best demonstration of how much Muybridge was respected is shown by the fact that he made several thousand photographs of nude models while at Pennsylvania and not a word was said. One of the committee members overseeing his work was fired for having a single nude model pose in his art class.

The Later Years

Muybridge began a second successful lecture tour in 1886. It lasted until 1893 when he opened a Zoopraxographical Hall at the Chicago World’s Exposition. This last was not a financial success and he moved back to his childhood home, Kingston on the Thames, England permanently in 1894. While there, he published two more books: Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion. He died in 1904 and in one last bit of irony for the man who changed his name so often, the name on his tombstone is Maybridge, not Muybridge.

REFERENCES:

Brian Clegg: The Man Who Stopped Time. The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge – Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer. Joseph Henry Press, 2007.

Gordon Hendricks: Eadweard Muybridge, the Father of the Motion Picture. Secker and Warburg, 1975.

Miles, Walter: The Stanford-Muybridge Motion Pictures of 1878-1879. Address to the Semi-Centennial Celebration of the Stanford Motion Picture Institute. May 8, 1929.

Soinit, Rebecca: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Penguin Books, 2004.

Stern, Keith: Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadward Muybridge. Shoreham House Publishers, 2011. NOTE: This is a historical novel, not an actual autobiography. But it is a fun read.

Leslie, Mitchell: The Man Who Stopped Time. Stanford Magazine, 2001.

More Muybridge:

Stephen Herbert’s page links to dozens of fascinating links concerning Muybridge.

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”  – Mark Twain

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
― Groucho Marx

My overview of American government goes generally like this:

1. Something happens.
2. The government passes some laws in response to it, adds on a few pork projects, and raises taxes to pay for the laws and the pork.
3. The laws (or pork) cause an entirely new problem.
4. Repeat.

The usual outcome of this cycle is that every year we have more laws and higher taxes. But every so often, some accidental side effect occurs and something awesomely good happens. So it was during the alphabet-soup days of New Deal government during the Great Depression. The accidental side effect was the Golden Age of American Photography. How it happened is rather interesting.

Farmers, the Great Depression, and the New Deal

Even before the Crash of 1929, farmers in America were struggling. American farmers produced so much food during the 1920s that prices dropped so low that they could barely support themselves. Many farmers responded by increasing production even more, trying to make up for narrower margins with higher quantities.

Once the Great Depression had begun, prices dropped so low that it often wasn’t worth the cost of transporting the crops to market. In some areas farmers burned corn instead of wood or coal in their stoves. In 1933, the American government responded by passing the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to NOT grow crops. The idea was that having fewer crops grown would decrease supply and raise prices, supporting agriculture. It also arranged low interest loans for farmers to buy equipment like tractors, increasing their efficiency.

It worked as well as most government interventions. Many landowners accepted government payouts instead of planting. What hadn’t occurred to the government was that most of the actual farming was done by tenant farmers. Since the landowner was getting paid to not farm, he had no use for the tenants. Even if he continued to farm, the landowner could take advantage of the new loan programs and buy a tractor that could replace several tenant farmers who plowed with their mules.

Now thousands of tenant farmers were homeless. The Government responded, as governments do, by creating the Resettlement Administration with the goal of moving 650,000 people to new farms. The program was controversial and poorly funded. All it accomplished was building 95 camps that provided housing to about 75,000 migrant farm workers, mostly in California. To top things off, in 1936, the Supreme Court decided the Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional.

Presented with this new problem, Congress responded by creating the Farm Security Administration, which took over for both the Agricultural Adjustment and Resettlement Administrations. This program was no more popular than its predecessors at first, and seen by many as an effort to bring Socialism to American agriculture.

Politicians will be politicians, though, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and a lot of Democratic Congressmen) was up for reelection. Bureaucrats will be bureaucrats and protect their agencies and jobs.  So the FSA opened an Information Division to ‘educate’ the public about all the good it was doing. The resulting propaganda blitz was more successful than they could have hoped.

Stryker’s Plan

Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement and Farm Security Administration, hired an ex-student, Roy Stryker to “to enhance the public’s perception of the federal aid programs for the destitute.” He was to show American voters that the Depression was everywhere, that government intervention on a national level was the only way to deal with it, and that government programs were working.

In the 1930′s, there was no internet or television. What people saw came mostly from pictures in magazines and newspapers. This was the era when glossy-photo magazines became widespread. Fortune, Look, and Life all started as photojournalism magazines in the 1930s.

Stryker’s plan was simple and effective. He knew that photographers were largely out of work because of the Depression, since newspapers and magazines had cut back staffs and people couldn’t afford either portraits or artistic photographs.

Stryker hired a number of excellent photographers on fairly simple terms. He gave them great cameras, unlimited supplies of film or plates, a small expense allowance, and some degree of artistic freedom. The photographers jumped at the chance, partly because there were so few opportunities available, partly because the work was interesting, and partly because many of them found it attractive politically.

Stryker would assign a photographer an area of the country and a general ‘shoot list’ documenting some aspect of American life in that region. He sent his photographers books and background materials before each assignment, outlined the projects in general, but then let the photographers work as they thought best.

Photographers sent all of their images to the FSA for processing. They also gave all rights to the FSA, although they could keep copies of prints or negatives for themselves. The majority of the time Stryker controlled the images totally — the negatives were sent to the central office for development and Stryker’s staff chose which images were circulated.

Stryker approached various newspapers and magazines and offered them photographic essays at absolutely no cost. Most of them, having cut back their photography departments in the Depression, were happy to use free FSA photos, of which almost 270,000 were taken.

There were some exceptions where Stryker directed his photographers to work directly with regional newspapers. Dorothea Lange, for example, developed her Migrant Mother images and sent them directly to local California newspapers. That explains why the local California papers showed this photograph . . .

. . . while the rest of the country (and we today) are used to seeing this image.

In a way, the project actually went viral, although they didn’t use such terms back then. Fortune, at least, sent its own teams of photographers and journalists on similar photographic missions.

The Photographers

The list of FSA Photographers is basically a Who’s Who of American photographers. Some, like Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans were well known before their work for FSA. Others, like Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, Marion Post-Wolcott, Russell Lee, and Jack Delano largely got their start through the FSA. As a group, they are some of the most influential photographers in the 20th Century.

These photographers, and others who followed them, defined the genre of documentary photography. Their images defined a critical time in history and explored techniques that guided photography for a generation. They also demonstrated just how powerfully photography could influence society.

For the first time, northeastern city dwellers actually saw the living conditions of poor tenant farmers and migrant workers.  People on the West Coast saw that those on the East Coast were faring no better than they.

How Did That Work Out for You, Roy?

Stryker, a man with a mission, tried to control his photographers – but given the group he was working with, that was doomed to total failure. Walker Evans, for example, would accept an assignment, go to that general area, and then photograph whatever he found appealing, whether it had anything to do with the assignment or not.

Stryker was quite a liberal for the time, hiring several female photographers and taking the unheard of (at the time) step of hiring a black photographer (Gordon Parks). It seems he assumed they would all be grateful at the opportunity and do whatever he told them. That didn’t quite work out.

Marion Post Wolcott may have provided some of the best images of the FSA photographers, but she apparently accounted for most of Stryker’s gray hair. In one letter to Post-Wolcott, it appears he might not have been quite as liberal as he seemed, telling her, “Slacks aren’t part of your attire. You’re a woman and a woman should never dress like a man.” and “You can’t depend on the wiles of femininity in the wilds of the South” (correspondence January 13th, 1939). I would love to have seen his face when she wrote back, “Skirts do not have pockets and I’m sure you’ll agree it would be inappropriate for me to keep film rolls and filters stuffed in my blouse between my titties.”

Gordon Parks (later the director of the 1970′s Shaft movies), who moved to Washington, D. C. from Seattle and Chicago, said later “I experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience.” He met cleaning woman Ella Watson and created his photograph “American Gothic, 1942″ as a response to the open prejudice he experienced. To his credit, Stryker simply said, “that picture could get us all fired” but didn’t destroy the image.

Marion Post Wolcott, in one correspondence, called her assignments “FSA cheesecake.” Stryker eventually said ”most of what the photographers have to do to stay on the payroll was routine stuff showing what a good job the agencies were doing out in the field. They are free to spend a day here, a day there, to get other images.”  Not surprising, it was the ‘other images’ that often were the best, but probably gave our boy Roy an ulcer or three.

Post-Wolcott and others spent significant amounts of time documenting things the administration didn’t particularly wish documented, especially racial inequality and the squalid living conditions of rural African Americans.

Margaret Bourke-White’s picture of African Americans waiting in a breadline under a billboard featuring a white family in their new car certainly caused some distress back in Washington —  FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein had designed the billboard.

In the long run, Dorothea Lange caused probably the biggest stir. In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. At the outbreak of World War II she gave up her fellowship to document the internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps. The Army impounded and classified all of her images, most of which weren’t released until 40 years later. (They have recently been published in book form.)

The Spin-Off Books

There was similar work being done outside of the FSA. Novelist Erskine Caldwell wrote controversial novels of the Old South. His wife, Margaret Bourke White, was a premier photographer of the day, the first staff photographer for Fortune Magazine. The two travelled through the South creating the book You Have Seen Their Faces featuring her photographs and his captions. The book, published in 1937, was widely read and critically acclaimed. Later, when it was found that Caldwell and Bourke-White had made up the photograph’s captions, which appeared to be factual, the book was discredited to some degree.

In one of the more bizarre stories of depression-era photography, Fortune Magazine writer James Agee talked the magazine into letting him spend several weeks in rural Alabama, supposedly reporting on the recovery of cotton farming. He also talked them into hiring photographer Walker Evans to take the photographs. Evans was at the time an FSA photographer. It is unclear if he was on loan to Fortune, between assignments, or most likely double-dipping employment. In any case the photos taken ended up in the Library of Congress archives.

Agee was very liberal (he later described himself as “a great deal more a communist than not”) and apparently hated his job at Fortune. He wrote the article far longer than the magazine could possibly publish and from a subversive point of view he knew they would not publish. As he expected, the magazine killed the story.  He and Evans published it in book form (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) in 1941, but it was not immediately popular since it was felt to be a knock-off of You Have Seen Their Faces. It was republished in 1960, and several times since, and to this day is considered one of the greatest photo documentary works ever made.

The Outcome

Despite the amazing work done by the FSA photographers, the agency itself remained constantly controversial. In 1943, Congress demanded it be disbanded and its services reorganized into existing bureaucracies. Stryker, fearing that enemies of his agency would destroy all of the photographs, donated 107,000 negatives to the Library of Congress before the agency disbanded. So in the sense of its original purpose, to show the Agency was doing great work, the project failed.

Stryker, interestingly enough, was immediately hired by Standard Oil Company to undertake a similar project to repair their tarnished reputation. He used several of his FSA photographers in this work, collecting 67,000 images over 8 years.

The subjects of the photographs didn’t benefit directly. After Lange’s Migrant Mother images appeared in California papers, tons of food were delivered to the migrant camp. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman pictured in Migrant Mother, had already moved to a new camp, trying to find work. The subjects of Evans and Agee’s book never benefitted (and their offspring remained bitter about their ‘exploitation’ for many years).

In fact, generally the subjects of the photographs were not impressed by either the photographer’s or government’s efforts on their behalf.

 ”There was plenty of people who couldn’t get a living out of a farm long before the Government heard about it.”  

Erskine Caldwell: You Have Seen Their Faces. 1937.

They simply endured and persevered, generally with dignity and pride.

The photographers, however, benefitted greatly. Dorothea Lange became the first fine art photographer on the faculty of the California School of Fine Art. Gordon Parks’ career can’t be covered in a few sentences: he was remarkably successful as a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer. Walker Evans became a writer for Time magazine and a faculty member at Yale University School of Fine Art. Arthur Rothstein was director of photography for Look magazine. I could go on for quite a while: the FSA photographers were among the most successful American photographers of the 20th Century.

Whether or not you think the program made a social difference probably depends more on your current politics than anything else. But what it did provide was amazing documentation of what life was like during the Great Depression. Anyone who feels sorry for themselves in the current hard economic times just has to look at those images for a while to feel perhaps things aren’t so bad  today.

Further Reading

Author’s note: If you’re interested in any of these, I strongly urge buying the actual book. The images don’t translate well to electronic readers, even my beloved iPad.

1. Agee, A and Evans, W: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Houghton Mifflin, 1939.  The text is overlong and rather syrupy. The images are amazing, disturbing, and inspiring. You can find inexpensive used copies everywhere. 
2. Caldwell, E and Bourke-White, M: You Have Seen Their Faces. Brown Thrasher Books, 1995. The text is really good, the images even better. But realize the text is fiction. 
3. Goldberg, V: Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography. Addison-Wesley, 1987. It’s a long book. I used it as a reference – I can’t read it cover-to-cover.
4. Gordon, L and Okihiro, G: Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. W. W. Norton, NY, 2006. The photographs aren’t as artistic or moving as some of her other work. But it is amazingly educational about a chapter in American history they didn’t teach me (or you) in school. 
5. Gordon, Linda: Dorothea Lange: A Life Without Limits. W. W. Norton, NY, 2009. Not quite as long as Bourke-White’s biography, rather more interesting. Few pictures, so this one is a good Kindle read. 
6. Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/background.html  History of the Farm Security Administration.
7. http://www.oberlin.edu/library/papers/honorshistory/2001-Gorman/FSA/FSAhistory/fsahist3.html
8. Nau, T: Walker Evans. Photographer of America. Roaring Book Press. Short, perhaps superficial text, but filled with amazing photography. 

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

October 2012

It’s been a long time since I did a photography history article. I generally prefer the early days of photography. People just were, I don’t know, more back then. There was more lying, backstabbing, more drama, and more originality. You name it; they did more of it.

In my various readings, which I do far too much of, I learned a bit about Samuel Morse and became fascinated. This guy had more careers than I have. (Hey, some of those careers I wanted to leave. Don’t be tacky.) At various times he was a preacher, a painter, a professor, an inventor, a photographer, and a politician.

But when I looked a little deeper, I found he wasn’t a Renaissance-type Polymath as I had assumed. Morse was an argumentative, whining man who failed at one career after another, fought with and sued (or was sued by) by virtually every associate he ever had, and played the poor-pitiful-me victim card at every turn. He succeeded at almost everything he did for a while, then failed miserably and left to do something else.

He is recognized as the inventor of the telegraph, which he really wasn’t, and the originator of Morse code, which he probably was. On one of his many career side-trips he also had a large role in bringing photography to the U. S. It is largely because of Morse that American photography took a leading role in the mid-1800s. That wasn’t really his intention, though. He spent far more time and energy telling everyone he had done it, than he actually spent in doing it.

He was an ugly man, as my sainted mother would say in her best Steel Magnolia voice. In the South ugly doesn’t refer so much to physical appearance as it does to personality. When I told the story of Petzval and Voigtlander it was a bit tragic; a great inventor robbed of his just rewards by a sneaky businessman. That happened to Morse, too, but he was his own worst enemy.

Morse’s Origins

Morse probably came by his rather opinionated personality rather naturally. He was born in 1791, the eldest son of Jedidiah Morse. As you would expect, with a name like Jedidiah, papa Morse was a fire breathing, New England Congregationalist Minister. He also wrote most of the Geography books that originated in America in the decades around 1800, and was widely known as ‘the Father of American Geography’.

Jedidiah followed the ‘Often wrong, never in doubt’ school of thinking with a nice dash of paranoia thrown in. He spent most of his time fighting Unitarianism, Popery, Freemasonry, and anything else he considered a threat to America. He knew most of the founding fathers of America, idolizing Washington but despising Adams and Jefferson as Jacobinists.

Samuel Morse spent most of his youth at various boarding schools (not unusual in the day) and eventually attended Yale College. Yale was largely known for two things: training Puritanical clergy (his parent’s hope for Samuel) and experimentation in newfangled sciences like electricity. In those days, Yale was largely a reaction to the more liberal Harvard College, with Yale’s Puritan roots showing in rules against ‘card playing, tavern going, and acts of disobedience to college authorities’.

Just like colleges today, the rules seemed put in place to mostly reassure the parents paying tuition. Morse played cards, hung out at the local tavern, went on ‘shooting parties’ with his classmates, and was at first an indifferent student. Like most college students, his letters home begged for more money; his parent’s responses were ‘not with those grades, Sammy’. Morse became a better student; his parents forked over more cash.

After putting his parents in debt obtaining his degree, Samuel did what children have done after graduation forever: he decided he really didn’t like the field his degree prepared him for. He wanted to be a painter (like on canvas, not like on houses). He had been a self-taught painter for some time and thought it would be a marvelous idea if he went to England to study painting for three years with two prominent American painters of the day, Washington Alliston and Benjamin West.

It somehow never occurred to Samuel that there was a reason Benjamin West, the greatest early American painter, lived in London and made his living painting pictures of King George and Horatio Nelson — there was no market for fine art in America at the time. Jedidiah was aware of this and refused Samuel’s request to study in England, setting him up in a nice apprenticeship with a book publisher.

Morse dutifully followed his father’s directions and took the job his father arranged at a Boston publisher. He proceeded to write home weekly that he was completely miserable, had no reason to live, but he would die happily knowing he had followed his family’s wishes. After some months of this Jedidiah was willing to pay any price to get Samuel out of his hair, so off to study art in England he went.

 The Painting Years

Morse was quite successful in his art studies, producing at least one critically acclaimed painting, Dying Hercules. He also managed to gain admittance to the Royal Academy in 1811, which probably had the added benefits of driving his Anglophobic father completely insane. Remember, the war of 1812 was right around the corner and so the U. S. and Britain weren’t exactly best friends at the time.

Morse returned to America in 1815 and did quite well as a painter — for a while. He was commissioned to paint portraits of John Adams, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among others. But commissions dried up as the American economy soured. For a decade Morse struggled financially. He moved constantly, taught students in Charleston and New York, and took commissions where he could get them.

He married, but his wife and children lived with his parents or other relatives while he worked to establish himself. However, even when Morse was doing well (at one time he had a large house in New York City and was regularly sending money home) he never sent for his family. When his wife died suddenly in 1825, Morse sent the children to live with various relatives and rarely visited them.

He was crushed that he was turned down to paint one of four scenes for the new United States Capital building. Instead, he painted a huge scene of the capital itself, hoping to draw large crowds to its exhibition, but this failed financially.

Morse's House of Representatives

In 1829 he decided he needed further study in Europe. He took commissions to paint copies of various famous paintings and left to spend the next three years in Italy and France. Toward the end of his stay he spent several months painting his masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre, expecting to sell it for a large sum when he returned to America. As usual, Morse was disappointed. The exhibition of the painting drew meager crowds and he sold it eventually for $1500.

The Gallery of the Louvre. The girl pictured is the daughter of James Fennimore Cooper who befriended Morse in Paris, and on whom Morse developed something of a crush.

The Early Telegraph Years

Morse returned to America on board the sailing ship Sully in 1832. During the voyage he had lengthy discussions with Dr. Thomas Jackson regarding the ability of electricity to pass a current instantaneously through a wire over great distances. After arriving back in America he began to work on a device using batteries and copper wire that would transmit a signal over distances.

Having no real scientific education, Morse spent a lot of time with Professor Leonard Gale who helped him develop a power source and the electromagnetic relays that let the system work over long distances. Having no practical engineering background, nor any money, he partnered with Alfred Vail, whose family owned a large machine shop and provided both funds and equipment to develop Morse’s ideas.

Morse and Vail exhibited a working device in 1838. Rather than using the series of dots and dashes that eventually became Morse code, they sent a series of numbers. The numbers each correlated to a word in a large dictionary. The number 29 might mean ‘horse’ while 162 might be ‘rider’, etc. (Morse felt selling the dictionary would be a major profit for his new invention.)

Finding no one in America was interested in purchasing his invention, Morse travelled back to Europe hoping to sell it there. Once again he was unsuccessful. Great Britain already had a working (in a limited way), patented telegraph system developed by Sir William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The system wasn’t nearly as good as the Morse system, which required just a single wire and was much simpler. On the other hand, it was Britain and Cooke and Wheatstone were British.

A similar reception awaited in Europe where the Gauss and Weber had developed a telegraph system that Carl Steinheil had deployed in Munich. Again, the system was more complex than Morse’s, but the Germans weren’t interested in paying Morse when they already had a system in place, even though it was a limited system.

As an aside (can you believe I got this far without an aside?) in 1839 Steinheil became the first German to use Daguerre’s newfangled camera system. Within a few months he had developed a method to create a negative image and multiple positive prints on paper, similar to Talbot’s photographs. In the 1850s he founded the Steinhill optical works and his son, Hugo, developed some of the most important camera lenses of the 1800s.

Apparently the closest Morse came to selling his system while in Europe was to Russia who found it attractive largely because it wasn’t British or German. But the Czars spent all their money on Faberge Eggs and such in those days, and never got around to purchasing the telegraph.

The French also took a look but they already had a high tech system in place: they had built a series of small towers a few miles apart, each of which had moveable wooden arms on top. The arms were controlled by ropes, sending a series of semaphore signals. The French felt this was far more reliable than some signal traveling through electrical wires. They sort of glossed over things like darkness, fog, rain, and wind; all of which made their system shut down.

Morse returned to America broke and unsuccessful. But his trip to Europe wasn’t entirely useless.

Photography

While in France in 1838, the American Ambassador arranged a meeting with a French inventor and showman, Louis Daguerre. Daguerre treated Morse to a show at his Diorama, demonstrated his new camera, and showed a number of photographs, which impressed Morse greatly. Morse returned the favor by demonstrating the telegraph to Daguerre. (It was during this demonstration that Daguerre’s Diorama Theater burnt down, so apparently Morse’s bad financial luck spread to people around him.)

Daguerre agreed to furnish Morse with all of the documentation for his process as soon as the French Government agreed to buy the photographic invention. Morse received his copy of Daguerre’s book in the summer of 1839 and built his own Daguerreotype camera. Morse, having no money as usual, talked his two brothers into removing the roof of their 6 story newspaper building and replacing it with a skylight, allowing him to have the first photography studio in America.

Morse partnered with Dr. John Draper, a Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Draper’s chemical background allowed him to make improvements to Daguerre’s development process. By 1840 he had shortened exposure times enough to take actual portraits, something Daguerre had felt could never be accomplished. He was also the first man to photograph the moon and the first American to take photographs through a microscope.

Morse and Draper also opened a daguerreian studio and classroom in 1840, assisted by Samuel Broadbent. While it seems Morse did not have great success in his portrait business, he took students and taught them the processes involved for a fee of $25 to $50. He made a reasonable living this way for several years.

In addition to Broadbent, Morse trained Mathew Brady, Albert Sands Southworth, Edward Anthony, and Jeremiah Gurney. These men went on to become America’s foremost early photographers.

Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs were the origin of Photojournalism. It is Brady’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln that provide the images on the Penny and $5 bill. Brady made almost every surviving photograph of American Civil War generals, both Union and Confederate.

Broadbent opened the first photographic studios in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Southworth did the same in Boston where he additionally was the photographer for the Massachusett’s General Hospital, recording operating room scenes including the first surgeries under anesthesia.

Anthony became the first to use photographs as legal evidence, submitting landscapes of the boundary between the U. S. and Canada to demonstrate landmarks. He later founded the E. & H. T. Anthony & Company, which was the largest distributor of photography equipment in the U. S. until Kodak changed the market. Oddly enough, Matthew Brady spent so much money making his Civil War photographs that his plates all became the property of E & H. T. Anthony & Co. when he defaulted on payment for his photographic supplies.

Gurney was probably the best-known American portrait photographer of the 1850s and 60s. He was one of the first American photographers to exhibit in Britain and Europe. It was his exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that led magazines of the day to state, “It is generally understood that the best daguerreotypes are produced in the United States”.

Like so many of his occupations, Morse was not particularly successful in his own photography business and he closed it within a few years, never to photograph again. His students, though, became the best-known American photographers of the Daguerreotype era and went on to train most of the American photographers of the next generation. Morse, therefore, has a legitimate claim to being the father of American photography.

Like his own children, though, he was an absentee father, having left the field shortly after it’s birth. And like much of his activities, Morse spent more time belittling the contributions of others and emphasizing his own than was appropriate.

He conveniently forgot the contributions of Dr. Draper, and in later life stated he taught Draper, rather than properly crediting him as a co-investigator. Draper’s doctorate in chemistry makes it unlikely that Morse, as he later claimed, made most of the advances in the development process. Indeed, Morse was reminded that he himself took instruction from François  Gouraud, an associate of Daguerre who came to America about the same time Morse began his photography experiments. When this was pointed out to him, he replied in print that he had spent considerable time unlearning what Gouraud wrongly taught.

The Rest of the Story

In 1843 Morse and his associates obtained a $30,000 grant from the U. S. Congress to create a telegraph line from Washington, D. C. to Baltimore, MD. It was hugely successful. Over the following years, the telegraph became perhaps the most important invention of the 1800s. Communication, which had been limited to the speed of a train or sailing ship, became almost instantaneous. Huge corporations, like Western Union and the Associated Press developed directly as a result of the new technology.

While Morse was successful, it seems unlikely he was ever happy. He was embroiled in dozens of lawsuits with various business partners and competitors for the remainder of his lifetime. While he became financially successful, it was largely because he received 5,000 shares of the Western Union Company when it incorporated. He got very little money directly from the telegraph.

In Europe, the patents of Wheatstone, Cooke and others prevented him from making any income from his now worldwide telegraph system, although several European countries banded together to give him some small payments in gratitude for his invention. He was also given honors equivalent to Knighthoods by several countries, including Denmark and Turkey. While he was immensely proud of this, it caused him problems back in the United States because accepting such honors should have meant giving up his U. S. citizenship.

Morse also appears to have forgotten those who helped him. He wrote dozens of letters-to-the-editor, depositions, and even books defending himself from charges that Vail, Professor Gale, Dr. Jackson, and numerous others were the true inventors of the Morse telegraph. Rather than graciously offering a bit of credit that was due, he generally claimed all the ideas were his in entirety.

In U. S. court cases, he was largely, but not entirely, successful in defending his patents. Vail, however, received a significant portion of the money Morse made from his inventions. He is also arguably credited with changing Morse code from the ‘word associated with a number’ method used originally to the Morse alphabet code that was eventually adopted for general use. It was also Vail who developed the telegraph key and Gale who created the repeater system that made long-distance transmission possible.

Some of this fighting was unavoidable with such a landmark invention, of course. There were obviously fortunes to be made by those who owned the rights to the telegraph. Some of the fighting appears to have just been Morse’s nature. Long after his patents had run out and his financial success was assured, he continued to write long letters to various newspapers refuting anyone who claimed any shared credit for his invention.

Americans idolized Morse for years after the telegraph was introduced. From his position of fame, he became rather political and wrote at length against – well, basically everything that wasn’t Calvinist American. He ran for office on anti-Catholic, anti-European, and anti-abolitionist platforms (1,2). After being soundly defeated (he received 759 votes when running for the Mayor of New York) he continued to write numerous political articles.

During the American Civil War he wrote long diatribes attempting to show that the Bible was pro-slavery and organized groups to oppose Lincoln whom he blamed for the Civil War. This might have been better received had he lived in the Confederate States. In his homes of New York and New England, though, it brought public opinion of him to new lows.

Morse returned to Europe for most of the last years of his life, largely because he felt more comfortable there. He finally returned home to New York in 1870. During his last years he was extremely philanthropic, making large donations to Churches and educational institutes.

Public opinion of Morse had largely rebounded by that time and on June 10th, 1871 a large celebration of his life took place. It began with the unveiling of a statue of him in Central Park, and ended in a large auditorium where Morse keyed out his last message in Morse code.

Morse died a few months later at age 81. At the time of his death he was writing a last rebuttal to an article written by the curator of the Smithsonian museum that claimed that Vail and Gale, not he, were the true inventors of the telegraph.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

October, 2012

References:

Bellis, Mary (2009). “Timeline: Biography of Samuel Morse 1791 – 1872″. The New York Times Company.

http://www.fullbooks.com/Samuel-F-B-Morse-His-Letters-and-Journalsx516.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20061212073521/http://www.morsehistoricsite.org/history/morse.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Morse

http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventors/a/samuel_morse.htm

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Samuel-Morses-Reversal-of-Fortune.html

Mabee, Carleton. The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. Morse. Rev. ed. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2000.
Samuel F. B. Morse Biography – life, parents, death, history, wife, mother, son, information, born, college, time http://www.notablebiographies.com/Mo-Ni/Morse-Samuel-F-B.html#b#ixzz28FHWCgxT

Silverman, Kenneth: Lightning Man: The Accursed Life Of Samuel F.B. Morse. Da Capo Press, 2004.

Bob’s dream for the project has been to produce a book of his images. His book, Ballerina, has been released this month.The net proceeds of the book will go to The Carey Foundation, a non-profit organization established by Bob & Linda Carey to provide support to women diagnosed with breast cancer.

Because we think it’s a great book, for a great cause, if you email your receipt for the book to support@lensrentals.com, we’ll give you a $50 Lensrentals.com Gift Certificate (limited time offer). That means, you’ll be getting a great book, $50 of rental credit, and supporting a great cause. You can buy the book HERE

Recently, Bob chatted with us a little bit about the project, its origins, and his favorite images.

© Bob Carey

The Tutu Project is really, really neat. Can you tell me a little bit about your inspiration for the project?

Well, the project started 9 ½ years ago. I had done a project before I had moved to New York, for Ballet Arizona. I was using a tutu, and photographed myself in the tutu in the studio, using the same style I was using for 10 years. Then, we got to New York, I looked at it, thought it was interesting, and went out to Coney Island one day and did four more images. Then, on December 29^th 2003, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I always used these photographs to keep myself away from reality. So, I started making these pictures again, and noticing, you know, that just one piece of pink material can change the context of your environment and what people think that are around when I’m doing them.

I started doing them more and more. She went through a very extensive, 1 ½ year treatment. Then 1 ½ years later, her cancer came back. By then, I had this collection of images, and she started showing them to the women (at the cancer center), getting their chemotherapy. It made them happy, and they thought they were funny, and entertaining. So I decided, they made this group of people happy, and took them away for a while during their treatments, I really would like to do this into a book, and have the images available to people in every cancer center in the country.

So we sold prints and t-shirts to raise money to have the book published. The project went viral. We’ve been on Yahoo, The Today Show, and soon we’ll be doing segments at halftime of NFL games during October. We’ll be making a photograph of the whole stadium while I’m in my tutu.

© Bob Carey

One thing that a lot of our blog readers are interested in, when they see these photos. What kind of camera do you use for this kind of stuff?

It used to be film in the beginning, and then I switched over to the Canon 5D, then the 5D Mk II. I’ve used that for the majority of my pictures. I’ve been playing around with the Nikon D800 for a while.

What’s the craziest pink tutu picture you’ve taken so far or what’s your favorite one?

The subway platform, me in the subway, I love that one. I was on a diving board in a town in New Jersey and was almost arrested, since we were trespassing a little bit. On highways, it’s kind of dangerous. Times Square hasn’t been that crazy. There is one of me in a parking lot, I love that, laying down in the parking lot.

I saw the parking lot one, it really stuck out to me. That was really cool. I just liked how it was a big, open, empty parking lot, and it was a great angle you had for that shot.

Thanks. We shot it off of a 6 story parking garage. One of my favorites now is the Lincoln Memorial.

© Bob Carey

Where do you get your ideas for the photos? Do you sit around and come up with them with your wife? Do people submit ideas to you?

I just kind of drive around and look for locations. When I find them, they are pretty much on the spot how they happen. Then, I look at the landscape, there is always a center point, there is always something to draw your eye to the center of the image.

I always try and add or mix-up the emotion in them. So I do a lot of jumping, or I’ll hang off of something, or I’ll have my back to the camera. It’s all about what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m going through at the time. Also, my body positions have a lot to do with the context of the background, the environment, the landscape. Usually, if it’s a fun background or fun landscape, I try and have more fun.

Bob’s book, Ballerina, has just been released. You can pick up your copy HERE. Send us your receipt and get $50 of Lensrentals.com account credit.

© Bob Carey

I do enjoy slapping an M-mount lens in front of my mirrorless camera once in a while, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t consider putting a large legacy zoom on an adapter mounted to a tiny camera a particularly useful endeavor.

I took a fair amount of email and forum criticism for that, from being called a weak old man (no argument from me) to being told I just hadn’t tried this or that favorite lens or else I wouldn’t talk that way.

One guy went so far as to say he owned over 50 lenses, and if I had his experience I wouldn’t limit myself. Now a more mature person than me would just laugh and move along. But age and maturity do not always arrive at the same time.

So I stomped into the back and asked the techs to give me the best possible zoom lens that could be shot on an adapter with my Olympus OM-D.

I was going to give this a fair trial. So here we go: The Red 18-85 T/2.9 PL zoom on my OM-D. Sharpest zoom with wide aperture, I said. That’s what they gave me.

Is it breathtakingly sharp? Yep, I believe so.

I say believe so because while I’m capable of handholding a 300mm f/2.8 for hours and a 500 f/4 for a shot or two, at 26-inches long and 9.9 pounds I was able to take, oh about three shots before I had to take some Motrin.

It vignettes a bit, but this extreme corner at T2.9 rivals any lens we’ve got for sharpness. This and a picture of the back of someone’s head were the two shots I took before I decided I should go do some testing.

Not that I couldn’t hold it longer if I really wanted to. More like I didn’t want to spend the afternoon at the minor med getting my shoulder X-rayed.

So did I learn anything today?

Yeah, I learned I was correct in saying I wanted to shoot native mount, AF lenses on my mirrorless cameras.

My Panasonic 12-35 f/2.8 may only have half the range of the Big Red Zoom. But at 1/10th the cost and 1/15th the weight, with autofocus to boot, I’ll be content with it for now. Unless I can figure out a way to put a tripod mount on that Red Zoom.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

August 2012