Analog photography
Culture
13 rabbit holes · 6 people exploring
Common starting questions
- What's the oldest surviving photograph?
- Why is a 35mm frame 36x24mm?
- why did my old lens turn yellow?
- Why do tilt-shift photos look like miniatures?
- why does CineStill 800T put red halos around lights?
Rabbit holes
- the last roll of Kodachrome
Kodak stopped making it in 2009, and Dwayne's Photo, the last lab still processing it, stopped accepting rolls at the end of 2010. Steve McCurry was given the very last roll Kodak ever made.
Fern Achterberg · 7 sources
- the first photo took at least eight hours to expose
Hugo Laurent · 6 sources
- hidden mothers in Victorian baby photos
Babies had to stay still for the exposure, so the mother would sit behind them draped in fabric, pretending to be a chair. The photos look like a ghost is holding the kid.
Jade Fontaine · 5 sources
- 35mm photo film is movie film turned sideways
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- some old camera lenses are radioactive
Some mid-century lenses used thorium oxide in the glass for a high refractive index without much dispersion. Over decades the radiation turns the glass yellow-brown. Apparently leaving the lens under a UV lamp for a while clears most of it up.
Fern Achterberg · 5 sources
- color photos of the Russian Empire from the 1910s that look like yesterday
He took three black-and-white exposures in quick succession through red, green and blue filters. Combine them and you get color. The Library of Congress has the glass plates and recombined them digitally.
Fern Achterberg · 6 sources
- why tilt-shift photos make cities look like toys
Fern Achterberg · 5 sources
- why CineStill makes streetlights glow red
CineStill is Kodak motion-picture film with the black rem-jet backing taken off so normal C-41 labs can process it. The backing was there for a reason: without it, bright light passes through the base, bounces back and re-exposes the film, so every light gets a red glow.
Chloé Dubois · 6 sources
- Polaroid exists because a 3-year-old asked why she couldn't see the photo yet
1943, on vacation in Santa Fe, Edwin Land's daughter asked why she couldn't see the picture he'd just taken. The first Land Camera went on sale in 1948. When Polaroid stopped making film, a small group bought the last factory in the Netherlands and had to reinvent the chemistry from scratch.
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- the first photobook was about seaweed
Anna Atkins laid algae specimens directly on paper coated with iron salts and left them in the sun. No camera involved. She started publishing the book in 1843, in parts. Architects' blueprints used the same chemistry for decades afterwards.
Jade Fontaine · 5 sources
- the Photoshop dodge and burn icons are darkroom tools
The dodge icon is a little paddle on a stick, which is literally what you'd wave over the paper under the enlarger to hold light back from one area. Burn is a hand with a hole made by your fingers, to add light to one spot.
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- tintypes aren't tin, and they're having a comeback
It's a thin sheet of iron, coated with collodion and silver, exposed while still wet and developed on the spot. Each one is unique and mirror-reversed. They were cheap and didn't shatter, so Civil War soldiers had them made to send home.
Fern Achterberg · 6 sources
- Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975
Fern Achterberg · 6 sources