LensMonger » History http://lensmonger.com Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:44:18 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 A wealth of vintage photography ads http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/vintage-photograph-ad-slideshow/ http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/vintage-photograph-ad-slideshow/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:53:30 +0000 derrick http://lensmonger.com/?p=236 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.

]]> http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/vintage-photograph-ad-slideshow/feed/ 3 A hundred years of infrared photography http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/a-hundred-years-of-infrared-photography/ http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/a-hundred-years-of-infrared-photography/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:25:28 +0000 derrick http://lensmonger.com/?p=230 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)

]]> http://lensmonger.com/2010/02/a-hundred-years-of-infrared-photography/feed/ 0 The Birth of Color Photography http://lensmonger.com/2010/01/the-birth-of-color-photography/ http://lensmonger.com/2010/01/the-birth-of-color-photography/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 07:16:54 +0000 derrick http://lensmonger.com/?p=81 Early color photography was a convoluted process and dalliance of the very learned. Join us as we explore some of the very first color photographs and the often cumbersome methods of creating them.]]> 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

It would be another seventeen years before Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron would perfect a heliochrome process that allowed a color photo to be fixed using a chemical process. Red and blue worked pretty well, but other colors were harder.  His view of Agen is an early example of this technique.

1877: A view of Agen

It wouldn’t be until 1891 that Gabriel Lippmann came up with an incredibly intricate process that changed the refractrive index of an emulsion by generating standing waves at different wavelengths. It worked, it offered the full spectrum of colors, but it had a limited viewing angle, required a diffuse source to be shined on it to be visible, and was incredibly impractical. Still, it was considered revolutionary at the time. So much so, that it netted him a Nobel Prize.

Early Lippman Photo (undated)

Time stands still for no man. Only five years later, the Joly color screen became briefly popular. By shooting and displaying the pictures through a filter consisting of colored lines – red, green, and blue – the eye was fooled in much the same way as modern color screens do.

Then, in 1907 along came Autochrome. The first color photography technique to have enduring success, Autochrome uses a sheet coated with microscopic colored translucent grains. Of potato starch. Yes. The first widely adopted color photography standard was a piece of glass covered in a very thin layer of potato. Unsurprisingly, this one didn’t earn anybody a Nobel Prize. But it did capture the first truly iconic color images.

1910: Still Life with Art Glass – Harry T. Shriver

Click on any image for a slideshow of these and more early color photographs

]]> http://lensmonger.com/2010/01/the-birth-of-color-photography/feed/ 0