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Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

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181–190 of 212 posts

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#181
post #2

Great find. Thanks for posting. I love it when photos from this era occasionally emerge showing people acting naturally. We're so used to seeing the vast majority of Victorian photographs showing dour-faced people sitting or standing stiffly to attention, that it's sometimes difficult to believe they had human emotions, just like us.

Some were stiff.

https://historyofyesterday.com/the-unsettling-victorian-trad...

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#182

> “When he was a young man at Oslo University he fell in love with a lady whom he did not know and with whom he was too bashful to become acquainted,” writes his biographer. “Wishing at least to have a picture of her, he decided that this was possible only by taking a photograph of her himself, without her knowing.” Oh, technology.

the OG Glassshole

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#183
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these looks like early summer photos though. Temperatures likely around 20C.

> early summer That seems quite specific. How do you tell? From what I see it's probably not winter (lack of snow), not autumn (lack of leaves on the ground). But that still leaves a pretty long time period with a bigger range of temperatures.

The vibrant leaves that you can see on trees in many of the pictures usually appear in mid-May and last until October, so that narrows it down in terms of temperature. Likely 15-25 C.

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#184
post #59

Somewhat unrelated question that I could probably Google, but I figured it's more interesting to hear your take. Why do people on old pictures look like they're from a completely different era? They look like they're from the 1800s. Is it the camera, the clothing or did they actually look slightly different from us? Or perhaps it's just an illusion? Realistically I wouldn't expect humans' appearance to change that mu…

IMO, when the face is very clear, it just looks like an ordinary person wearing fancy Victorian clothes.

It's only when the faces are small or blurry do they look old.

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s great. I also love video footage from that era as well, capturing the ordinary bustle of the streets. It’s fun when it’s local and you can point to familiar places. One of my favourites is Victoria and Vancouver BC around 1900[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/Jp1qWV5OZec

Given how quiet the roads and pavements are in the video and photos does anyone know why the streets were built so wide?

No lanes, no rules, no turn signals, pedestrians are walking everywhere, every transport had it own speed and size, etc. And lots of goo on the road.

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not usually "the fine article". That is just a euphemism. TFA originates from RTFM, which stands for "read the fucking manual". And it is "fucking" and not "fine", because people would be frustrated by noobs not reading manuals.

RTFM was always, "read the fucking manual." In my experience, this is the first time I have seen TFA as anything other than "the fine article." YMMV.

And you don't see the obvious link between people saying RTFM! because someone didn't read the manual, and people saying "RTFA" or "it's in TFA" because people are writing comments on an article when they clearly didn't read it?

These acronyms are born out of frustration and not cordial conversation. Again using "fine" instead of "fucking" is just a euphemism. It is not the original nor correct phrase, and it doesn't make sense for it to be anything other than "fucking".

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#187
post #100
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that the trauma was even stronger in the USSR, which lost unfathomable numbers, and that maybe that generational trauma -- even moreso than communism -- resulted in the hawkish, militaristic, paranoid, confrontational, guns-before-butter standoff across the iron curtain throughout the cold war and which I think even lingers today.

I know people that come from the USSR... they universally fear war even today and think that's a realistic possibility in the near future. Most people living today have grandparents who can still recall the horrors of WWII... they lost a much larger share of their population to the war than all countries in the West (I think more USSR citizens died in the war than in all other countries combined). Nazis burning entir…

Yup, exactly that. Polish literary Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz was an immigrant to the US around 1946-1950 period, and he noted that what struck him in the US was that an average American is probably 10x kinder and nicer person than an average Pole. To him, the Americans were almost like children, happy and innocent, unaffected by the horrors of this world that the Polish people were subjected to.

As Nietzche noted - what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and Poles (and Russians, Ukrainians, Belorusians) that survived the war and communism are pretty tough as a result - but at the cost of having a crushed sprit and, quite often, losing hope in humanity.

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#188
post #24

near as i can tell, he used a stirn concealed vest camera. http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Stirn_Concealed_Vest_Camera round film plate. no cassette, just round emulsified glass. six-exposure 14cm or four-exposure 17cm depending on model. exposure is allegedly adjustable somehow, but i'm not sure of the mechanism. plate loads into an internal frame with masks, advanced by the center dial, not sure how masks align. many m…

It’s reported in the first sentence of the second paragraph if you read TFA.

Re: Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

#190

The last photo of the man being affectionate with his young daughter is surprising to me. All my life, I've thought that men born before 1950, like my father, just didn't do that sort of thing. And yet here is a man born a hundred years earlier doing just that.

>The last photo of the man being affectionate with his young daughter is surprising to me.

Not 100% sure either way, but that may also be his son. Young boys also wore dress-like clothing during those times.

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