Archive for the ‘Photography History’ Category

Ask Yourself: How Do I Scan My Photos To Preserve History

Monday, July 13th, 2009

A Wartime Salvage Campaign Shows Why It’s Key To Start A Plan: How to Scan My Photos Today

Historical Photos Survive In Digital Form Today

 

Our lives would be different if not for the amazing, trail-blazing female role models, activists and leaders who came before us.

 

To celebrate International Women’s Day, held every March 8, the Library of Congress compiled nearly two dozen photos from the 1910s to 1940s. They reflect the strength, spirit and resilience of such women.

 

One in particular stands out: A shot of Annette Del Sur in 1942. Smartly dressed in a gray skirt suit, Annette is participating – actually, she’s publicizing – a salvage campaign at Douglas Aircraft Company in southern California. A glance at her should spark the thought: I need to find out how to scan my photos. It’s a critical reminder of why the past is so important.

 

In the picture, Annette is at the Douglas Aircraft Company, which had just opened a 1.4-million-square-foot warplane factory in Long Beach the year before (November 1941). The facility was considered cutting edge, thanks in part to the air-conditioned interiors, a novelty back then for a manufacturing plant. Douglas was the country’s biggest manufacturer of aircrafts at one point, but it eventually faltered and merged with another entity to become McDonnell Douglas Corporation in 1967.

 

Alfred T. Palmer took the photograph of Annette, a slim, curly-haired brunette. She’s smiling in the image. Around her head and neck, she’s sporting what look to be recycled pieces of metal. (They would no doubt be considered art today!) If this image had just been snapped, we imagine Annette would have told herself, I need to know how to scan my photos. Sending them away to a professional company to be digitally converted and easily and safely saved is a wonderful way to hold onto such a keepsake.

 

The photo of Annette portrays a young woman happily reusing and repurposing items. With all the talk these days about living in a sustainable manner and saving our planet, this photo feels incredibly fresh and relevant in 2009. It’s a significant reminder that our eco-friendly efforts are not new, that nothing should be so disposable. Rather, our efforts are part of a cycle we must continue for the sake of future generations.

15 Photos – 15 Lakers’ Championships – A NBA Dynasty

Friday, June 19th, 2009

We’re a pretty hard working bunch here at ScanDigital, but every year in late May and June you’ll catch a handful of us making sure we’re getting out of the office with plenty of time to make the NBA Finals – ESPECIALLY when the Lakers are playing in the finals.

We even had two employees take the day off to attend the championship parade.  So in honor of the 2009 NBA Champion LA Lakers, here are photos from each Finals they’ve ever won.  You’ll be scrolling down for a bit – there are 15 of them (16 if you count the championship they won before they moved into the NBA).

1948

1949

1950

1952

1953

1954

1980

1982

1985

1987

1988

2000

2001

2002

2009

Where We’re Coming From…

Monday, November 24th, 2008

I found my old 35mm camera again this morning. I haven’t used it since college—but it’s been lovingly packed up and carried with my wherever I move, even if it’s to just sit on a shelf or in the back of my closet.

I have two digital cameras which see far more use, but nothing will ever make me give up that old camera.

Two reasons: it was my first real, grown-up, utterly manual camera—everything this camera did was my choice, good or bad—and my grandfather gave me this camera as a gift before I left for college. It was a requirement that all incoming photo students own a 35mm camera with an internal light meter. The camera was given to him several years before, but he had another which he preferred.

The camera itself is a Rolleiflex and is a workhorse of German engineering that will quite likely outlive the 35mm film format. I keep it in a mismatched leather case that doesn’t quite close because the front of the original fell off during a trip to the zoo and dropped into the wolf enclosure. I remember there being a moment where I was watching the case fall and thought, “I could still grab it…but then I might drop the camera…” The wolves could have the case. I spent a majority of my time in college with this camera to my eye—even without it I saw the world through a frame: how would I photograph this? What aperture? What speed? Each and every moment could be a perfect image just waiting to be caught.

Time seems different when you can press it into film. There is something frozen about a photograph, something still and quiet. You have to slow down if you want to look at old albums or slides—you have to specifically seek them out. It’s the same to taking pictures on film—you have to move deliberately to some extent. If there’s anything to call our lives in 2008, slow is far from it, and stopping everything to try a find your family’s old pictures isn’t as appealing. Especially not when digital cameras enable us to have years of images and memories just a few mouse clicks away.

Does that mean that we have any desire to get rid of these old photographs, negatives, or slides? Not at all, just like I would never even dream of getting rid of my grandfather’s camera. These are history—more than that, these are our histories. One of a kind and utterly priceless.

When was the last time you looked through your stacks of old photographs? Many of us even have inherited drawers or boxes filled from our parents, and their parents as well. All filled with small windows into the past that we might not have ever seen. Wouldn’t you like to?

This is where ScanDigital is ready to help you.

The Future of History – A Slide Scanning Project

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

As some of you may know based on my bio at ScanDigital, I was a history major at Dartmouth and spent a number of years working in commercial real estate investment banking. So when the City of Pasadena called us to bid on a large historical architecture preservation project, I was particularly excited and honored. From a business perspective, this was obviously the type of call we love to receive. From a personal perspective, this type of project is particularly interesting to me. In my free time, I enjoy reading about architecture, both old and new.

For those of you who may not live in Southern California, Pasadena has one of the most active historic preservation societies in the country and the City is home to numerous famous residential and commercial properties. The bid process involved scanning a small group of slides and about a month ago ScanDigital was pleased to learn that we were awarded the project.

Our team recently begun scanning slides that document many of the historic properties in Pasadena. In addition to the slide scanning work we are performing, we will optimize the images digitally and, perhaps most importantly, we will be tagging the images with metadata in order to create a searchable database of images. The conversion of these slides to digital, to me, represents a new trend in historical preservation and archiving. Prior to our work scanning the slides they sat relatively useless in the basement of Pasadena’s permit office. Once the project is complete, residents of the city will be able to enjoy an easily search-able and usable version of these historic slides. It will be a great way for residents, old and new, to gain better access to their City’s history.

We look forward to working on projects like this as more and more cities across the country seek to move into the digital age, clear their offices of old materials and preserve this historic material for future generations. In times past, discovering historical information involved a lot of digging and searching, with new digital capabilities the future of history will be far more manageable and accessible. I am truly proud to be working on the Pasadena project and excited to see the end result of photographic database we will help them create.

It’s All In The Eyes

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

In my first semester of attending photography school full time I had a professor who was a very successful working photographer. I actually wondered sometimes why he taught. Especially after visiting his home studio in Venice. There was no doubt that he had done exceptionally well for himself. Anyway, during our first week of class he told us that we had to put together a book with tear sheets from magazines, et cetera that we liked. Now, that was broad yet, specific to the individual. He went on to explain that it could be anything for any reason. Whether you liked the lighting, the colors, it turned you on or repulsed you for whatever reason. It could be a photographer’s work that you admired or hated.

The exercise later revealed his reasoning. He had us take a lupe and look at the eeyes_zoom8_cl250_zoom4_cl250_zoom2_cl250.gifyes of the subject in the photograph; especially studio photographs. By doing this it was a bit confusing at first but then completely obvious. You could see the lighting in the subject’s eyes. By studying the eyes you can generally determine where the light source was coming from and the shape of the light source. You could see if it was round, square, rectangular and the size and angle of the light. His suggestion was to find a photograph that you liked, look at the eyes, determine how it was lit and duplicate it. After recreating it, ask yourself what would I do different and do it.

It was a great idea and learning experience for any beginning photographer and/or student. It’s easy to look at something and think to one’s self that, “I can do that”. Well, this exercise was a way to prove it. I made such an attempt at duplicating a beauty shot I saw and it was difficult but exciting all at once. Nonetheless, it worked.

Currently and forever the only slight problem with the exercise is the blessing and curse of advancing technology in photography especially as it relates to Photoshop. A great tool for so many things whether creative and/or purely maintenance on photographs it can limit one’s learning experience in the aforementioned example. Primarily because the eyes can now be retouched to the extent that it makes it very difficult if not at times impossible to see the lighting scheme in the eyes.

Alas there are still great painters to study. Light is light and it hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Paintings are like photographs in that it takes a 2-dimensional medium and by using or manipulating light creates a 3-dimensional piece of work. The information is all around us. You can look at the way the light falls on your date or mate’s face when sitting at dinner or how the light bounces off a building in the late afternoon creating a warm and soft glow. The information is still in the eyes, your eyes.

We’ve come a long way…

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Yesterday marked anniversary of the original patent for the first roll-film camera and the registration of the name “Kodak”. The patent was awarded to George Eastman in 1888.

I was facinated to learn of Eastman’s story and what lead to the patent.

In his early 20s, Eastman was working as a bank clerk and purchased some photographic equipment for a vacation , but never made the vacation. george_eastman_580x.jpgHe was instantly enamored with photography, though he was less enthusiastic about the cumbersome and limiting nature of wet-plate technology. So he set out to find a better solution. Eastman continued working at the bank while devoting his evenings to experimentation. By 1880 he had devised his own dry-plate formula and went into the photographic business full time. As he ran a young company struggling to survive, Eastman began looking for new exposure methods that could bring photography to the masses. Eastman kept experimenting until he hit on the solution: cellulose. It produced a clean image and was easily spooled onto a film roller, making it compact. As we know now, this was the birth of modern camera film. By 1888, he was ready to patent the first camera using that film.Another bit of interesting trivia is the background of the word Kodak, which has become one of the most recognizable brand names ever, there is no special meaning attached to it. Eastman explained its origin: “I devised the name myself. The letter ‘K’ had been a favorite with me — it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with ‘K.’ The word ‘Kodak’ is the result.”

Source: kodak.com, Wired.com