A few months ago, I picked up a photograph on eBay showing a view of a town with a body of water in the background, evidently taken from a great height. The seller described it as an “early aerial photo ca. 1860 from balloon” but wasn’t sure quite when it had been taken or where,…
No, I don’t mean pictures of people playing table tennis. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the “ping pong” was one of the cheapest and most popular types of photograph in America. But chances are you’ve never heard of it. The very term “ping pong,” in its photographic sense, has now fallen into…
Nineteenth-century portrait photography was rich in creative artifices and illusions. Some of these are familiar to today’s enthusiasts and easy to spot, but others remain obscure and unrecognized. In this blog post, I’d like to share what I’ve been able to learn about one lesser-known device I call the Rhode Island Window (RIW). Why give…
A few weeks ago, I blogged about using historical images of reflections in people’s eyes as a source for accidental stereoscopic images (although not very detailed ones). Now I’d like to consider a similar kind of source that could have a lot more potential: images of reflections in water. I’m interested mainly in bringing older…
The centerpiece of this post is an animation showing the rise of the “say cheese” smile in American portrait photography. In three seconds, it displays the change in typical facial expression over the first four decades of the twentieth century as condensed from nearly fifteen hundred actual photographic portraits. If you’re the sort of reader…
At the moment I’m writing these words, I don’t believe the name James Ross would mean anything to even the most well-informed cinema historians. But I think it should, since Ross may well have shot the world’s first-ever motion picture—depending on how we define such things—sometime before July 1876. It was admittedly a very short…
On May 19, 2013, while on the road home from the ARSC conference in Kansas City, I spotted a stack of tintypes at an antique mall in Springfield, Illinois, including this one, which I picked up for $2 as the first in what has since grown to be a fairly large collection of such things:…
Back in May, I blogged here about some experiments I’d carried out using animated GIFs to create illusions of perspective and motion from simultaneously-taken pairs of tintype portraits. Two of the pairs of “twin” tintypes I shared then had been taken from lenses mounted side by side, and these yielded convincing stereoscopic effects—they were basically…
If you spend much time around old photographs, you’ve probably run into sets of “twin” tintypes that look identical at first glance. Unlike photographic prints made from negatives, however, every tintype is technically unique. “Twin” tintypes are thus never exact duplicates of one another; instead, they were taken simultaneously from slightly different perspectives with a…
Stereoviews were the first commercially mass-produced media designed to be accessed with a special piece of equipment—namely, a stereoscope or stereoviewer. In that important sense, they anticipated the later media of cinema (motion pictures) and phonography (sound recordings). But stereoviews are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to twenty-first-century accessibility. Today it’s fairly easy…
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