The Digital Insider

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.

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 eyes 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.

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. He 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