This is a compelling use of AI for photographic manipulation (in my mind more practical than many of the other AI image generation examples that are flooding the art websites these days): basically the software can analyze a photograph, use AI to generate a pretty accurate depth map of the subject of the photo, and then use that for dynamic relighting (allowing you to add different artificial lights, color gels, etc.). You can try the web-based demo on your own photos! Neat.
In the 1890s the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann devised a new method of taking photographs that led to the first photographic recording of color:
Lippmann’s color photography process involved projecting the optical image as usual onto a photographic plate. The projection was done through a glass plate coated with a transparent emulsion of very fine silver halide grains on the other side. There was also a liquid mercury mirror in contact with the emulsion, so the projected light traveled through the emulsion, hit the mirror, and was reflected back into the emulsion.
The resulting plates are pretty cool looking, as seen in the video — very similar to the discovery of holography decades later — and technically they record a wider spectrum of color than our standard modern imaging techniques. He won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his research, but the method was largely shelved due to the complexity of the process and the inability to make color prints, which also didn’t appear commercially until much later.
In 2021 researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne published a paper on their research into Lippmann’s images, including a new method that lets us see the images closer to the original color captured in the photographic scene.
Side trivia: among Lippmann’s doctoral students at the Sarbonne was Maria Sklodowska, later a winner of multiple Nobel prizes herself, under her better-known married name: Marie Curie!
’We will see… landscapes,’ they announced, ‘in which the trees bow to the whims of the wind, the leaves ripple and glitter in the rays of the sun.’ Along with the familiar photographic leitmotif of the leaves, such kindred subjects as undulating waves, moving clouds, and changing facial expressions ranked high in early prophesies. All of them conveyed the longing for an instrument which would capture the slightest incidents of the world about us.
Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer writing about the dreams of photography pioneers Henry Cook and Gaetano Bonnelli, who in the 1860s invented a device called a photobioscope that combined stereoscope + zoetrope effects to show primitive short “3D” “movie” loops. It’s interesting to think about the decades in which photography was new and exploding in use, but it couldn’t capture the essence of normal day-to-day movement due to the long exposure times.
We’re still chasing those dreams, 150 years later.
(Via this excellent Bright Wall / Dark Room essay on Totoro)
As an art person I’ve enjoyed a good amount of time around lithography and other drawing media, and now I’m engaged to a children’s book illustrator who largely works in watercolor, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time at art supply shops buying paper. One thing has bugged me for years about our fine rag paper purchases, though: what’s up with the “BFK” in “Rives Arches BFK”? I’ve asked professors, professional printers, other artists, and even the Internet, with no great leads, but I finally coaxed the answer out of Google today. From The Albumen & Salted Paper Book: The history and practice of photographic printing, 1840-1895:
It is no wonder that only two paper mills in the world managed to consistently produce a paper of the necessary quality, and these two mills were able to maintain their monopoly from the 1860’s until approximately World War I. They were the above-mentioned Blanchet Frères et Klébler Co. in Rives, France (hence their product was known as the “Rives” paper) and Steinbach and Company, located in Malmedy, Belgium (at that time part of Germany). Steinbach paper was known outside Germany as “Saxe” paper.
The product that established their paper monopoly (duopoly?) — the exploding new field of photography! More to the point, 3D stereography, the Victorian postcard origin of a Tumblr meme:
In the late 1850’s and especially after 1860, two new factors in photographic technology and practice generated a great demand for albumen paper. The first of these was the stereograph; its ability to transport the viewer to distant scenes with the illusion of three-dimensional reality depended largely on the smooth surface and fine detail of albumen paper. Stereo views were extremely popular, and created a corresponding demand for albumen paper. Nearly all stereo views before 1890 were made on albumen paper.
This 3D thing will catch on one of these days…
Via New Scientist, research into an image processing technique designed to mask the actual physical position of the photographer, by creating an interpolated photograph from an artificial vantage point:
The technology was conceived in September 2007, when the Burmese junta began arresting people who had taken photos of the violence meted out by police against pro-democracy protestors, many of whom were monks. “Burmese government agents video-recorded the protests and analysed the footage to identify people with cameras,” says security engineer Shishir Nagaraja of the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, India. By checking the perspective of pictures subsequently published on the internet, the agents worked out who was responsible for them. …
The images can come from more than one source: what’s important is that they are taken at around the same time of a reasonably static scene from different viewing angles. Software then examines the pictures and generates a 3D “depth map” of the scene. Next, the user chooses an arbitrary viewing angle for a photo they want to post online.
Interesting stuff, but lots to contemplate here. Does an artificially-constructed photograph like this carry the same weight as a “straight” digital image? How often is an individual able to round up a multitude of photos taken of the same scene at the same time, without too much action occurring between each shot? What happens if this technique implicates a bystander who happened to be standing in the “new” camera’s position?
Ghostly photos from the Otis Archives depicting a novel circa-1885 piece of scientific analysis equipment: Apparatus for taking Composite Photographs of Skulls. Basically a wood and brass frame with a craniophore in the middle, the tool made it possible to position and align multiple skulls so composite photos could be taken accurately from the front, side, and rear views. The image on the right, for example, is a composite of five or six (or more?) separate skulls. From a contemporary anthropology journal describing the process:
Then the anterior frame and the lateral frame next to the window are lowered ; a black velvet background is hung on the posterior frame ; a large white cardboard is hung on the frame further from the window ; the brass-work is occluded with small velvet screens, and the picture is taken.
The photographs record composites of skulls from various Native American and Cook Island tribes (as seen in the archives of the Clark Institute), so I first thought that the measurements were sadly being undertaken for the sake of scientific racism, the darker side of physical anthropology, which was still in vogue in the 1880s.
That may be the case, but thankfully the full story is somewhat more complex: the inventor of the apparatus, Washington Matthews, an army surgeon-ethnographer-linguist, wrote extensively on the Siouan languages while stationed in the Dakotas, reportedly married and had a son with a woman from the Hidatsa tribe, was initiated into some aspects of the Navajo tribe, and also contributed substantially to the understanding and recording of the Navajo culture, which previously had been considered primitive by the Europeans:
Dr Matthews referred to Dr Leatherman’s account of the Navahoes as the one long accepted as authoritative. In it that writer has declared that they have no traditions nor poetry, and that their songs “were but a succession of grunts.” Dr. Matthews discovered that they had a multitude of legends, so numerous that he never hoped to collect them all: an elaborate religion, with symbolism and allegory, which might vie with that of the Greeks; numerous and formulated prayers and songs, not only multitudinous, but relating to all subjects, and composed for every circumstance of life. The songs are as full of poetic images and figures of speech as occur in English, and are handed down from father to son, from generation to generation.
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Frank Zappa as the mystery guest on What’s My Line. Pretty dry, to be honest, although some might find interest in hearing him go into surprising detail about the video-to-film process used in filming 200 Motels (it was shot and edited in PAL video then upconverted to 35mm, a novel process at the time).
So why do I post this? Because at the 2:50 mark he references the awesome Time Life photo of him and his parents, confessing that it was “too purple.”
The ESO’s Very Large Telescope (I love that name, nicely to-the-point) shoots a sodium-exciting laser towards the center of the Milky Way to create an artificial “star” of light in the sky, helping calibrate its adaptive optics system. Sort of like white balancing your camera, but much, much cooler looking.
Photo credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky
Astronauts Michael Good and Garrett Reisman peeking in through the aft windows of the shuttle Atlantis during last week’s spacewalk. Hopefully HAL will let them back in.
(Full size version over at NASA. Via The Register)
Whatever Happened to N.W.A.’s Posse? LA Weekly tracks down all of the guys featured on the cover of N.W.A.’s lesser known first album, perhaps the first photo of gangsta rap. A handful of them were only there to give rides to their friends. For the others, though, this album launched careers that would redefine the 1990’s music landscape (see if you can spot Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren…). Here’s one incredible bit of trivia:
When N.W.A signed with Priority, the group was only the label’s second signed act. The other was the California Raisins. That’s right: The first noncompilation album released by Priority was The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs. The second was Straight Outta Compton.
