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When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

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Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#31

Post by contingencies »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #6

> This meant toting hundreds of pounds of equipment — including volatile chemicals, a darkroom tent and fragile glass plates — to wherever they hoped to snap a scene. I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was…

Did something similar with postcards after inheriting some from the late 19th century, but expanded beyond the family. There is a very interesting evolution in printing technologies including inks, printing processes, and paper stock that parallels that of the imaging techniques. In many cases, the clarity obtained with turn of the 20th century techniques, particularly in countries like Germany and Japan, clearly outdo popular modern systems. Good museums for this sort of thing include the Národní technické muzeum (National Technical Museum) in Prague, Czech Republic and the Musée de l'Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique (Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication) in Lyon, France. https://plasy.ntm.cz/en/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/pr... https://www.imprimerie.lyon.fr/en/edito/museum-english-speak...

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#32

Post by devb »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #23
radlad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital. Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.

Maybe someone else knows why black and white film looks sharper and has more detail then. Was there a race to the bottom in terms of optics when color film showed up in the consumer camera? Is it because they moved to a smaller film stock than the medium format 120 film that was common in B&W cameras before color? Or is color film, with three layers of gelatin, an inherently "noisier" film stock? I don't know. I only…

Black and white film retains the developed silver particles, whereas color processing discards the silver entirely and leaves clouds of dye behind to form the image. The silver has higher acutance, of course.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#33

Post by cr1895 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #6

> This meant toting hundreds of pounds of equipment — including volatile chemicals, a darkroom tent and fragile glass plates — to wherever they hoped to snap a scene. I am something of a "photography genealogist" for the family. My father's half-aunt lived to be 103, never had children, and left behind a suitcase stuffed with photos — going back to a tintype of her mother from the 1880's. I was lucky the suitcase was…

That's a really neat project! Thanks for sharing.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#34

Post by nextaccountic »

MattJ100 wrote: post #29
lblume wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counterpoint: photography enabled integrity and authenticity of images, which fueled journalistic credibility, in general becoming one part in fostering a high-trust society. AI image generation leads to these advances being slowly eradicated as generated images increasingly cannot be differentiated from unfabricated evidence. In this light, photography was socially progressive, while AI generation of photorealisti…

> photography enabled integrity and authenticity of images, which fueled journalistic credibility Countercounterpoint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

Also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#/media/File:Nik... (original image)

vs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#/media/File:Sta... (edited image)

With photography, you could produce images that look authentic, and could convince people because they are photos, but are actually hoaxes

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#35

Post by vintermann »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #14
bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please upload these photos to Commons, especially if you own the rights to them; photos taken in the US before 1930 can be shared even if they are not yours, too. These stories and associated artifacts are interesting and deserve to be shared, if you're comfortable with it.

I've posted already to ancestry.com, findagrave.com, etc. (But I am inclined to do up a blog post about it so I can talk about it and embed the photos.)

Those two are both owned by Ancestry, and as you know, Ancestry requires expensive subscriptions to be of much use. I understand you have already invested a lot in it, and that US genealogy is hard to do with only public sources, but people just getting into genealogy should really avoid getting locked into Ancestry and MyHeritage.

They sell access to what others have contributed freely, sometimes they even sell you your own information back to you. For instance, if you want to use the birth and death dates, sources etc. that you've laboriously entered into a MyHeritage tree in Geni, you need a Geni Pro account. (Geni is owned by MyHeritage).

I think that of the three big American options, FamilySearch is best. Yes, it's the Mormons, and they do have an ulterior motive in their "baptism of the dead" thing, but they don't charge, they have an excellent transcribed source repository, free text search of machine-learning OCRd source documents, and actually smart matching. I'm glad their tithes pay for a state of the art genealogy research platform, I can think of a lot worse things it could have gone to!

They're also, interestingly enough, the least Anglo-biased: they don't give a child their father's last name by default, for instance.

The main downside is that they don't have any DNA features.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#36

Post by throwaway290 »

api wrote: post #8

The discourse around photography and art reminds me exactly of the discourse around AI and art too: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... In some cases pieces I've read on AI and art contain phrases or paragraphs that are almost word for word identical to photography and art discourse. There were moral panics around photography too, especially its obvious use in pornography. There was of cou…

Photography does not involve automated large scale stealing intellectual property from other photographers without crediting or paying them

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#37

Post by kjkjadksj »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #23
radlad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So sad that we traded fast lenses and film for color. I am not sure the quality ever quite caught up again to the better B&W until we get to modern digital. Can you explain why color film would be a tradeoff against fast lenses? Can't you use the exact same lens with color or B&W? Or what you mean by "traded film for color"? After all, color film existed decades before digital.

Maybe someone else knows why black and white film looks sharper and has more detail then. Was there a race to the bottom in terms of optics when color film showed up in the consumer camera? Is it because they moved to a smaller film stock than the medium format 120 film that was common in B&W cameras before color? Or is color film, with three layers of gelatin, an inherently "noisier" film stock? I don't know. I only…

The ae1 was fine unless there was some junk lens from a department store on the end of it. Canon lens would have been fine. It is true color film however is usually of lower apparent quality than black and white films. A lot of people would buy consumer films that are worse than pro films (true for today as well, compare portra 160 to gold and theres noticable difference in grain size and overall fidelity). Printing was also bad. You could probably make higher quality scans or prints today if you had access to the negatives.

Slide film is great though if the scene was appropriately lit. Better colors than digital even today. All the catalog photography from the late 90s was medium format slide film and you could blow it up billboard size it had so much fidelity.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#38

Post by kjkjadksj »

radlad wrote: post #28
_aavaa_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s multiple things going on. The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image. And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

> And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film. Maybe perceptually - due to stronger contrast and perhaps also the fact that B&W film often comes in higher speeds and probably incurs less motion blur of the subject overall. But I don't think it's actually objectively sharper per se?

In terms of grain I think the finest is still bw film. Highest exposure latitude as well. Great dynamic range as well probably still better than digital.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#39

Post by kjkjadksj »

brudgers wrote: post #27
_aavaa_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s multiple things going on. The larger the film stock, the easier it is to get a certain final resolution. Both because the film itself needs to be magnified less when creating the final print and because the lenses don’t need to create as small of an image. And BW film even today is still MUCH sharper, even if just perceptually, than color film.

No one has ever looked at a photograph and wept because it was so sharp... ...of course many photographers have wept because a photograph wasn't sharp.

There have been millions of photos that have suffered at the hands of the sharpness slider.

Re: When photography was born, fascination, obsession, and danger followed

#40

Post by kjkjadksj »

lblume wrote: post #20
api wrote: post #8

The discourse around photography and art reminds me exactly of the discourse around AI and art too: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... In some cases pieces I've read on AI and art contain phrases or paragraphs that are almost word for word identical to photography and art discourse. There were moral panics around photography too, especially its obvious use in pornography. There was of cou…

A counterpoint: photography enabled integrity and authenticity of images, which fueled journalistic credibility, in general becoming one part in fostering a high-trust society. AI image generation leads to these advances being slowly eradicated as generated images increasingly cannot be differentiated from unfabricated evidence. In this light, photography was socially progressive, while AI generation of photorealisti…

Dark room magic is as old as the art. As is the case then as it is now, you can’t trust a photo without an unbroken chain of provenance. One of the most famous film photographs is of course on alleging the lochness monster.
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