Jim Mathis

Before John Logie Baird first demonstrated his television in 1927, before Thomas Edison showed his movie projector in 1888, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was making moving pictures.

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer who is best known for Migrant Mother, an iconic photo of the Great Depression. Her work helped Americans see the devastating effects of the depression on rural America, and Lange is now celebrated as a pioneer in the field of documentary photography.

My wife and I recently spent some time updating our estate plans, or what will happen to our “stuff” after we die. Since we don’t have children and our other family and friends all know us in different ways and for different reasons, it seemed prudent to go ahead and get a first draft of our obituaries going.

Few people had visited the Grand Canyon of Arizona before the turn of the 20th century. The journey was long and difficult due to the rugged and remote location.

William Henry Fox Talbot was on his honeymoon at Lake Como in northern Italy in 1833. He was trying to sketch the beautiful lake and the surrounding scenery but was becoming increasingly frustrated with his lack of drawing skills. He used a camera lucida and a camera obscura, two devices that use lenses to project an image onto a piece of paper to aid in drawing, but he didn’t find either one very satisfactory.

Philippe Halsman was born in Riga, Latvia, on May 2, 1906. He discovered an old view camera in the family attic when he was fifteen, bought some glass plates, and started making photographs. Like many other photographers, when he first saw that image appearing in the darkroom tray, it was a life-changing moment, and he knew what he was going to be doing with his life.

The story of the American West is filled with many characters and large personalities. How the West was won or lost, depending on which side you were on, can be told through the lives of many people. Not all were cowboys, outlaws, gamblers, or lawmen like are often portrayed in the movies and novels; some were photographers. One of the photographers whose story looms large is William Henry Jackson.

How long do photographs last? The answer to that question is not as simple as we might think. There are many variables such as the process used, environmental issues, as well as at what point do we consider the photograph unusable?

Virtual reality, or VR, is not a new thing. The idea that our left eye and right eye see the same thing from slightly different angles and that our brains combine these two distinct images in such a way that we can see in three dimensions has existed since at least the early 19th century. It was first demonstrated by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838.

After being invented in the early 1800s, photography and cameras have gone through three major eras: the plate era, the film era, and the current digital era. This article is a brief history of photography through the lens of these eras.

The day after photography was invented in 1839, somebody pointed out that the photographs were just shades of gray – there was no color. The photography inventors knew this was a problem and probably hoped that no one would notice. Paintings were in vivid color and if photography was ever to compete with painting, there needed to be some color in them.