Perusing the amazing Project Gutenberg, I stumbled across a motherload of vintage photography ads. From the No. 1 Autographic Kodak special pictured aside to the photo oil colors I’ve mentioned before, this is a real treasure chest of nostalgia.

A lot has changed in the last 90-odd years. f4.0 was considered fast back then, for one, and “practically free of double image” was considered high praise for a lens. Most of these ads are for products produced by boutique manufacturers long since forgotten: Ica-Contessa, Willoughby’s (the world’s largest camera supply house), Wollensack, Glundlach, and more. They’re all here.

Click on the image to launch the vintage photography ad slideshow.

A hundred years ago, the first infrared photo was published in the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society. To say that the world hasn’t been the same since is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s certainly looked a bit trippier since.  Like so many things,  once the purvey of the rich and dedicated, IR photography is almost trivial now. Your camera sensor is already sensetive to IR light, if less so than visible light. So all you have to do to take an infrared shot is filter out the actual, visible colors. I guess it goes without saying that there are filters for that. Once you filter out the visible spectrum and you dial up (way up) the exposure time, what you get is a glimpse into a world that looks almost, but not quite, just like our own world.

Even if you don’t have a camera that takes filters, you can play around with IR photography yourself. All it takes is about four layers of Congo Blue and 30 seconds or so of exposure in full daylight. And a tripod. Trial and error may be involved.

(Photo via Wikipedia)

The very first color photograph was taken by a true polymath, James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell’s work on electromagnetic theory paved the way for the theory of relativity. In his off time, he taught for free at the local community college, engineered bridges, and discovered additive color. His work on the perception of color led him at the ripe old age of 30 to create the world’s first permanent color photograph. Well, kind of permanent, anyways. His technique involved taking three pictures of the subject, each with a colored gel, red, green, and blue. To display it, one had use lamps to project colored light through the three monochrome transparencies. It was all pretty cumbersome.

1861: The world’s first color photograph – a tartan ribbon