Category: History of Photography
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A Brief History of Early Lenses: Part 1
We are all recent-centric. We tend to think the technology we use didn’t exist until last year or so, even though the roots of it go way back. Phone apps are a great example. I have a dozen little apps on that phone that do things like calculate depth of field, mortgage payments, and when it will…
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How Potatoes and Gelatin Created Color Photography
Long ago, I wrote articles about the glory days of photography. The days when any photographer worth a damn dabbled in chemical explosives or Bitumen of Judea and spun off side gigs like Lionel toy trains or fashion clothing. Back then your competition didn’t dabble in stealing your photographs,…
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A Clear History of Glass
I’ve written about glass, as in lenses, for years now. But I’ve never looked into the history of glass as just a substance, because, well, who cared? When I accidentally did some reading about early glass, though, I was rather amazed at just how important it was. So I thought I’d write about the…
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The Space Lens Mystery Screw
We get to do some fun things through our testing company, Olaf Optical Testing. A lot of it I can’t talk about but sometimes we get a project that we can share. One of these came up recently when Matt Leeg asked us if we were interested in testing and cleaning an Angenieux 25mm f/0.95 lens that was…
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Cotton. Sidney Cotton.
“He caused a lot of trouble over here, you know.” A librarian at the Royal Aeronautical Society, when asked for references on Sydney Cotton.
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I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 1995
I doubt any of you remember it, but 1995 was the coming out party for Digital SLRs. There had been digital cameras before then. There had even been digital SLR cameras of a sort – modified cameras tethered to a hard drive — before then. But in 1995 camera makers released digital SLR cameras for the…
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The Heights and Depths of Nadar: TL;DR Version
“He is a man of wit without a shadow of rationality . . . His life has been, still is, and always will be incoherent.” Charles Philipon, describing Felix Tournachon.
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The Most Honored Photograph
Doesn’t look like much, does it? But, depending upon your definition, this photograph, a team effort by 9 men, is the most honored picture in U. S. History. If you want to find out about it, read on. It’s an interesting tale about how people sometimes rise beyond all expectations. It takes place in…
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And Edgerton Said, “Let There Be Light.”
The more I learn about the history of photography, the more I come to realize that just about every important advancement since 1850 has its roots in photography. The 8 hour workday, paid vacations, and employee stock options? A photography manufacturer started them. Telegraph? A photographer…
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From the Great Pyramid to Toy Trains: Early Flash Photography
Whenever out-of-print books start arriving at Lensrentals, they know I’m about to write a history article. It happened again last week, and one of the young employees asked me, “why do you write these things?” I told them because I have urochordataphobia — I fear the example of the sea squirt.
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The Most Interesting Photographer Ever Is…
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…
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Six Degrees of Charles Darwin, and Rejlander’s Last Laugh.
Note: For those offended by such things, there is a small photograph reproduced below that has artistic nudity.