Taken By Machine » History of Photography http://takenbymachine.com/blog Photography Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:10:08 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 The Dawn of Kodachrome http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/09/05/the-dawn-of-kodachrome/ http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/09/05/the-dawn-of-kodachrome/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:47:38 +0000 machine http://takenbymachine.com/blog/?p=426 Time Magazine has a great (but too short) photographic essay on FSA photographers who used Kodak color film to record scenes from the Great Depression. When you’re so used to seeing that time period in black and white… color can be quite startling.

Picture 3

]]> http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/09/05/the-dawn-of-kodachrome/feed/ 0 The Genius of Photography http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/08/29/the-genius-of-photography/ http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/08/29/the-genius-of-photography/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:00:33 +0000 machine http://takenbymachine.com/blog/?p=419 I saw a great six part documentary a year or so ago on BBC 4 called The Genius of Photography, which doesn’t appear to be available on DVD outside of the UK… but can be found in the various places on the internets where video is usually located. I won’t Google it for you but… Veoh has 4 of the 6 episodes here.


The documentary skips around in the history of photography, giving some artists no more than a few seconds of screen-time and leaving many out altogether… but for everything familiar that’s left out there’s something unusual brought in. For example… the first episode points out the influence of photography in the painter Degas, whose paintings have a “photographic” quality to them…. with cut off edges and arrangements that are reminiscent of stereographs. And there are many snippets of interviews with living photographers, art-directors, curators and others that make this series worth hunting down.

]]> http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/08/29/the-genius-of-photography/feed/ 4 The Sony Mavica http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/07/04/the-sony-mavica/ http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/07/04/the-sony-mavica/#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:52:41 +0000 machine http://takenbymachine.com/blog/?p=323 I always believed that the Sony Mavica was the first consumer digital camera… but apparently it was the first electronic camera, producing analog video stills which it saved on two inch floppy disks. The disks held 50 photos which you would view on your television set. Pretty fancy for 1981.

6126912

I especially like the interchangeable lenses. I’m trying to imagine a practical application for a camera of this sort, but I imagine that it was such a novelty at the time that any shortcomings were probably overlooked. I tried to find some sample “photos” from the camera but considering the difficulty of moving files off those 2 inch disks…

]]> http://takenbymachine.com/blog/2009/07/04/the-sony-mavica/feed/ 0