“Watch the Birdie” – that’s what my parents told me, to make sure I look into the camera before they took a photo of me. I guess lots of you guys remember this saying. With the renovation of a 140-year-old historic brass birdie, I show you the origin of this phrase.
How Kodak is trying to reinvent after failing to adapt
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Kodak is certainly one of the most iconic names in the photography industry. At the same time, it’s also one of the companies with the most turbulent history. This brilliant video from Wall Street Journal guides you through 140 years of Kodak’s history in only eight minutes and shows you all ups and downs of the former tech giant.
Newspaper Navigator is a free online base of 1.56 million newspaper photos
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The Library of Congress has created a fantastic online trip down the history lane. Newspaper Navigator is an online base consisting of 16,3 million newspaper pages, out of which 1.5 million are photos. It covers the period between 1900 and 1963, giving you a whole lot of historic newspaper photos and headlines in just a few clicks.
Move over selfies – Cartes de Visites were the first great photography craze
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Before Instagram, selfie sticks, disposable cameras, Polaroids, and box brownies, there were carte de visites – small photographic albumen prints, mounted on card, which were wildly popular during the Victorian era.
Also known as CdV, carte de visites followed the early pioneering photographic techniques such as daguerreotype and ambrotype, which were expensive and difficult to reproduce. Cartes de visites were born from calling cards, which bore the owner’s name and usually an emblem, and were presented to the host during a social visit. Homes often had a tray near the door for collecting calling cards.
The British Museum now lets you freely access 1.9 million images from its collection online
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It’s always a good time to browse through online galleries of historic photos. But if there’s the best time for it, it’s probably now while we’re in isolation. Because of this, the British Museum has revamped its online collection sooner than planned. It has made 1.9 million images free to view, download and use under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
How still life came to photography
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A while back, I had another roundtable discussion at the Film Photographers Association. This time the subject was Still Life Photography. It is a genre we all take for granted and include in it a great variety of photographs. I would like to explore the origins of still life in painting, how it came to photography, and eventually expanded in coverage and scope. Mind you, I do not intend to limit anyone’s vision but to make the reader a bit more aware of the origins of still life. And, by no means, is it the last word on the subject.
Ten important moments in history that changed photography
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Like any other field of art or technology, photography has been changing and evolving over the years. But there were some moments that significantly changed the course of photography history. In this video, Tony & Chelsea Northrup bring you ten of these important moments and discuss how they affected photography.
Gary Oldman will make a movie about Eadweard Muybridge (and murder, and horses)
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If there’s one early photography pioneer worth making a movie about, it has to be Eadweard Muybridge. He was a progenitor of motion picture and recognized for the iconic series of photographs titled “The Horse in Motion”. But it wasn’t just his contributions in photography that he became known for, for he also gained infamy for murdering his wife’s lover back in the late 1800s. It’s just been confirmed that Gary Oldman will be writing, directing, and acting in the photographer’s biopic titled ‘The Flying Horse”.
Photographer recreates the three most famous ghost photos ever taken
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I’m sure many of you were fascinated by mysteries when you were kids. Some of you maybe still are, even though many mysteries from our childhood have been demystified, especially the photos of “paranormal activities.”
Photographer Mathieu Stern turned his childhood obsession into photos. He recreated the three most famous ghost photos that scared all of us when we were kids. In his latest video, he shows the process and the method, some history behind the images, but some fun bloopers as well. Although the video is fun, the final result of the photos brings back the memories of the times when we were still afraid of ghosts.
This is the first ever photo of a total solar eclipse
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Total solar eclipse is coming on August 21, and I guess your cameras and protective filters are ready. But before you start filming or photographing this phenomenon, would you like to see the first ever photo of it?
Prussian photographer Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski was the one who took the first correctly exposed daguerreotype of total solar eclipse. It was on July 28, 1851, in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). No one before him managed to do it; it’s not an easy task even today. But Berkowski made a breakthrough 166 years ago.
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