Captain Scott’s Lost Antarctic Expedition Photographs

Image by Robert Falcon Scott courtesy of
Little, Brown and Company via The New York Times

via brain pickings
“The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition brings these brave men’s story to light, and does so with an incredible story of its own. Several years ago, as polar historian David M. Wilson was having a drink at a London salon, he was approached by an art collector by the name of Richard Kossow, who claimed that in 2001 he had purchased a portfolio of Antarctic photographs from the early 1900s. Wilson was already intrigued, but when Kossow informed him that the photos were from Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-13 expedition, whose ill-fated crew featured Wilson’s great-uncle, Edward Wilson, and they were taken by Scott himself, Wilson nearly choked on his gin and tonic. The rest, as the saying goes, is history…”
Rest the rest here. Turn of the century polar photography and gin and tonic — two of my favorites.

Sitting on a paper moon

via retronaut
More images here.  Listen to a recorded version of “It’s Only A Paper Moon” sung by Abbie Gardner and see more images here.

Photoseed.com

via art of the photogravure
“PhotoSeed is a labor of love by David Spencer, a passionate and leading collector of vintage fine-art photography. The site, comprised of his personal collection, was populated in his free time and includes his detailed backgrounds for many of the works. Defined by the depth of the collection and content, it’s a tool for new users and the curious, as well as scholarly researchers.”
Explore Photoseed here.

Throwable panoramic ball camera

via designboom
“Containing 36 image sensor modules, the descriptively named prototype camera takes a single wide angle aerial panorama image when launched into the air...”
Read more here and here.

Lytro Light Field Camera

via cult of mac
“This is the Lytro, a bizarre and radical new concept in digital photography that lets you snap an image now, and worry about focusing it later. Pre-orders just opened today, and you can grab one for as little as $399. But before you click the order button, make sure you have a Mac – because Lytro doesn’t work with Windows computers yet.

How does the Lytro work? The official description sounds like something from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field…”

Read the rest here, and more on the Lytro here, here, and here.

Julian Bialowas: Visual Thinking

via how
“Looking for some visual and mental inspiration? Check out 365Q from Canadian photographer and designer Julian Bialowas, who paired an inspirational quote with one of her images every day for a year...”

Richard Nicholson: The Last Of London’s Darkrooms

via npr
“Richard Nicholson recalls that in the ’90s, darkrooms were busy, exciting places for commercial photographers in London: ‘There was a real buzz in these places,’ he writes,‘a sense of competition, but also communality.’

About a decade later, he was struck by how much had changed. ‘I came up with idea for this project when printing in one of these hire darkrooms. The buzz had gone. No one else was there. It seemed like a desolate, abandoned place. I was struck by the bulky, lumpen beauty of the photographic enlargers.’

And so began his project, Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a documentation of London’s remaining professional darkrooms. A mere five years after starting the project, more than half of the darkrooms in the series are no longer operational.

‘I wanted to capture the darkroom before it disappeared,’ Nicholson says. ‘I choose to photograph the darkrooms of professional printers as these represent the essence of the craft.’ ”
Visit his site here.

Lewis Hine: Photographer, Activist, Character

An expert linotyper in a
Southern publishing house.

via nytimes
Read this post by James Esztrin on the role of the photograph in affecting social change.

Ochre Mills

via Juniata’s River Valleys By Jeffrey Adams
My in-laws loaned us a copy of the book this past weekend. Lots of interesting photos and snippets of tales. I love the name “Ochre Mills” which is near Juniata [note the typo on the old photo]. I wonder if remnants of the area still around, or if it is now silently resting under a development.
You can see more of Adams’ book here.

1942: Marg Printing & Engraving

via retronaut
At the Corner of Pearl St., NYC, from the Charles Cushman Collection
See more images here, and visit the Charles Cushman Collection here.

Reynolds Stone’s Press

via letterology
“Reynolds Stone (1909 - 1979) was a very distinguished British wood engraver, letter cutter and painter who lived in rural Dorset, England. His wife, Janet was a skilled photographer and took these two and a quarter square format photos of him and his presses in the mid-1960s. The negatives were found recently by his son-in-law and artist, Ian Beck who scanned and posted them here.”

Caren Alpert’s Microscopic Photography

Life Saver, 17X Magnification

via a friend
Read Caren Alpert’s artistic statement here, and visit her gallery here.

Google Books includes new Penn State titles

via Penn State University Libraries Newswire 
“Each month new Penn State titles are added to Google Books. Sacred and legendary art, Applied motion study, Hopes and fears for art, The afterglow of European travel, The castle builders, Aliens or Americans and Memorials of prison life are a few of the books now available online...”
Read the full story on Live here. Among the books they have digitized is Instruction in photography (1905). You can find the updated listing of books here.

Inside Out: A Global Arts Project

via photojojo
“The Banksy of the photo world wants you to be in his next project! 2011′s TED Prize winner JR is known for combating social inequalities with photography. He’s plastered massive 20 foot tall portraits from Paris to Brazil, Nairobi, and Cambodia. Inside Out is a photo project that asks anyone to upload their portrait with their personal story. After uploading, your photo’s then mailed to you as a poster that you can post in public. The goal? To give individuals a voice and unveil the untold stories of people around the world. Awareness and mutual respect are the aim!”
Visit the Photojojo site here, and the Inside Out site here.

Union Square: 1910

via shorpy
New York circa 1910. “Union Square.” The Met Life tower presides over this panoramic view, a composite of four 8x10 glass negatives. Looking up Broadway, you can just see the block that where American Ballet Theatre’s home is today at 890.
View the full size here.

Christopher Jonassen: Worn-out Fryingpans

via tasteologies
Christopher Jonassen’s investigation of worn-out fryingpans reminds me of looking at images of distant planets and other celestial bodies.
See the images here.

Linotype Machines

spotted vis a friend on TunnelBug's photostream 
“These ghostly linotype machines stand guard on the 7th floor of this early 20th century gothic masterpiece in St Louis, MO. Linotypes made the plate for printing presses by embossing red hot plates of iron. I couldn't help but imagine red hot plates of iron passing the halls of this grand skyscraper…”
Visit TunnelBug's photostream here.

Restoring an 1870s Tintype

via topdog imaging and boingboing
“Bob Rosinsky from Top Dog Imaging walks through the extraordinary process of restoring a badly damaged 1870s tintype using modern, high-tech techniques, such as a polarized strobe and ultra-high-rez camera. He hints at even more advanced techniques employing X-rays, UV and infra-red light…”
Read the rest here.

Lytro: Tech That May Change Photography Forever

Pointed out by my father-in-law. Info below via fast company:
“So what's the fuss all about? It's called light field, or plenoptic, photography, and the core thinking behind Lytro is contained neatly in one paper from the original Stanford research--though the basic principle is simple. Normal cameras work in roughly the same way your eye does, with a lens at the front that gathers rays of light from the view in front of it, and focuses them through an aperture onto a sensor (the silicon in your DSLR or the retina in your eye). To focus your eye or a traditional camera you adjust the lens in different ways to capture light rays from different parts of the scene and throw it onto the sensor. Easy. This does have a number of side effects, including the need to focus on one thing. This adds complexity, and, if used well, beauty to a photo.

But Lytro's technology includes a large array of microlenses in front of the camera sensor. Think of them as a synthetic equivalent of the thousands of tiny lenses on a fly's eye. The physics and math gets a bit tricky here, but the overall result is this: Instead of the camera's sensor recording a single image that's shaped by the settings of your camera lens, aperture and so on, the sensor records a complex pattern that represents light coming from all the parts of the scene in front of it, not just the bits you would've focused on using a normal camera. The image is then passed to software which can decode it.

And this is where things get freaky. Because the system captures data about the direction of light rays from the scene, it can be programmed to ‘focus’ on any depth in the photo--years after you took the original image.”
Read the rest here, morecan be found here, here, and here. Visit the Lytro Picture Gallery here.

Cocktail Colors Seen Through the Microscope

Gin & Tonic

via colourlovers
“BevShot images are made by first crystallizing the drink of choice on a lab slide. Using a standard light microscope with a camera attached, the light source is polarized and passed through the crystal. This creates the colors we see…”
Read the rest here.