I wish I’d checked out the Mathew Brady collection at the National Archives a lot sooner. For the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with techniques for animating historical photographs, and I’ve had difficulty finding suitable material to experiment on—especially groups of three or more pictures taken at the same time from different perspectives. It…
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…
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 eyes, it’s said, are the mirror of the soul. But they also serve as mirrors more literally: we can see things reflected in them. And when we’re looking at two eyes side by side, we can often see the same things reflected in both at once, from slightly different vantage points—nature’s own stereoviews! With…
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:…
There’s always room for improvement, as they say. In February 2014, I posted my first entry on this blog, “Historical Stereoviews as Tweened Animated GIFs,” demonstrating a method of creating animated GIFs from stereoviews that aren’t as headache-inducing as the common “wiggle GIF.” You might recognize our alligator friend from that post—it was my first-ever…
News media were recently abuzz with reports of a study in which the “average” faces of women from forty-one different countries had just been discovered by combining and averaging large numbers of real individual photos. In fact, it wasn’t so simple: as the Huffington Post observes, this work had actually been done a couple years…
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…
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