Photography News

August 20, 2016 /Photography News/ These two lovely retro cameras were made using the wonderful For Mother and For Father papers, but any other type of retro paper will do. A hidden back box on the camera opens to hold photos. 

The SVG cutting file can be downloaded here: http://tarascraftstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/camera-bellows.svg

2.  Begin folding the side zigzag score lines.  You will fold in the mountains and keep the valleys out as shown below:

3.  Now repeat this with all 4 of the bellow pieces.  Notice below that one piece has zigzag fold lines going the same direction, and one piece has zigzag fold lines going the opposite direction.  This will allow the pieces to fit together correctly when assembled.

4.  Unfold and apply score tape right next to the long score line on the zigzags as shown below on both sides of one of the pieces.

5.  Refold the piece back into position and remove the paper backing from the Score-Tape.  Take one of the pieces with the opposite score lines and hold it 90 degrees apart and begin adhering the sides together as shown:

Full instructions can be found at Tara's Craft Studio

See also:
DIY Instagram-inspired photo booth
How to make a pinhole camera from concrete
The Craft Camera, a DIY digital cardboard camera
DIY: Free printable DSLR lens hoods

Henri Le Secq atop the Notre Dame Cathedral. Paris, France, 1853

August 18, 2016 /Photography News/ Born 198 years ago, on 18 August 1818, Henri Jean-Louis Le Secq was a French photographer and painter. After the French government made the daguerreotype open for public in 1851, Le Secq was one of the five photographers selected to carry out a photographic survey of architecture (Commission des Monuments Historiques).

Le Secq was trained in sculpture and worked in several studios, later starting his photographic career under Paul Delaroche. He experimented with various photograph processing techniques together with his colleague Charles Nègre and later worked with Gustave Le Gray learning the waxed-paper negative process. This process had the advantage that it produced negatives unlike the daguerreotype process. He, along with Hippolyte Bayard, Edouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray and O Mestral, was sent on Missions Héliographiques to document famous architectural monuments in France. He worked mainly on cathedrals in Chartres, Strasbourg, Reims and near Paris. Cameras capable of taking large photographs, size of 51 cm by 74 cm, were used. His works during this Commission des Monuments Historiques are considered to be his finest works. In 1851 he became one of the founders of the first photographic organization of the world, unfortunately very short lived, Société héliographique (1851–1853). 

Le Secq gave up photography after 1856 but continued to paint and collect art. Around 1870 he started reprinting his famous works as cyanotypes as he was afraid of possible loss due to fading. He gave the reprints dates of the original negatives, some of which are still in good condition.

Henri Le Secq died on 26 December 1882.

August 16, 2016 /Photography News/ Born 184 years ago today, on 16 August 1832, Charles Roscoe Savage was a British-born landscape and portrait photographer who produced images of the American West. He became one of the foremost 19th century landscape photographers of the western United States, as well as a renowned studio portrait photographer, with his studio in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Shortly after his 1848 baptism and membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Savage emigrated to the United States where he initially found work as a photographer in New York City. On assignment from the LDS Church he traveled to Nebraska, where he established a  studio. In the spring of 1860, he traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah Territory with his family, where he established another photography studio with a partner, Marsena Cannon, an early Utah daguerreotypist and photographer. A year later, after Cannon moved to southern Utah, Savage established a partnership with artist George Ottinger. Many of Savage's photographs were reproduced in Harper's Weekly newspaper, which created a national reputation for the firm. This partnership continued until 1870, when Savage formed the Pioneer Art Gallery, and in 1875, needing more space, he replaced it with the Art Bazaar which -in 1883- burned to the ground with all of his negatives.

As a photographer under contract with the Union Pacific Railroad, Savage traveled to California in 1866 and then followed the rails back to Utah. He photographed the linking of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific on Promontory Summit, at Promontory, Utah in 1869. This series is considered his most famous work. Other well known Savage images include pictures of the Great Basin tribes, especially the Paiute and Shoshone. Savage photographed scenic areas of the west including Yellowstone National Park, Zion National Park, and created many images documenting the growth of Utah towns and cities. He also traveled extensively over western North America, taking pictures in areas of Canada and Mexico, and in areas from the Pacific Ocean to Nebraska in the mid-west.

After his death on 4 February 1909, another fire -in 1911- destroyed all of the negatives from the last 25 years of his career.

August 12, 2016 /Photography News/  In 1898 U.S. attention focused on Florida as the Spanish-American War began on April 25. The port city of Tampa served as the primary staging area for U.S. troops bound for the war in Cuba. The arrival of over 30,000 troops, including Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders cavalry unit, changed Tampa from a small town to a city.

Florida, the closest state to the Caribbean and home to a large Cuban immigrant population, became the setting for much of the action in Cuba's fight for independence from Spain. 

Although the main issue was Cuban independence, the ten-week war was fought in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

August 12, 1898 marks the end of the Spanish-American War, with the Americans defeating the Spaniards.

The images included in this set have been selected from the Photographic Collection of the State Library and Archives of Florida.

The Florida Photographic Collection contains more than 157,000 images, representing the most complete portrait of Florida available.

July 26, 2016 /Photography News/ Apollo 15 embarked 45 years ago, on July 26 of 1971, and was the ninth manned mission in the Apollo program, the fourth mission to land on the Moon and the eighth successful manned mission. Two astronauts, Commander David R. Scott and LM (Lunar Module) pilot James B. Irwin, are shown during their 4 days on the lunar surface. Shortly thereafter, the Apollo 17 mission landed, in December of 1972, and would be the sixth and final mission in which humans would roam the moon. The photographs from the 17th mission include Commander Eugene A. Cernan, LM pilot Harrison H. Schmitt and CM (Command Module) pilot Ronald E. Evans. Some activities depicted in the collection of twelve images include; the retrieval of a film canister on the outside of a spacecraft, the preparation of a LRV (Lunar Roving Vehicle), collection of lunar samples and, of course, the overall exploration of the moon’s surface.

Schmitt with Flag and Earth Above
Maker: NASA
Date: December 13, 1972
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Apollo 17 Astronaut Evans Retrieves Film Canister During Space Walk
Maker: NASA
Date: December 14, 1972
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Cernan Driving the Rover
Maker: NASA
Date: December 1, 1972
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Apollo 17 Command/Service modules photographed from lunar module in orbit
Maker: NASA
Date: December 1, 1972
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Scott Gives Salute
Maker: NASA
Date: August 1, 1971
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Lunar Activities During the Apollo 15 Mission
Maker: NASA
Date: July/August 1971
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt Collects Lunar Rock Samples
Maker: NASA
Date: December 14, 1972
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

Astronaut Irwin with LRV
Maker: NASA
Date: July 26, 1971
Medium: color print, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process
Dimensions: Image: 26.5 x 34.2 cm . Overall: 27.6 x 35.6 cm
George Eastman House Collection

July 25, 2016 /Photography News/ Born 173 years ago today, Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American photographer, realist painter, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history.

Eakins has been credited with having "introduced the camera to the American art studio" (Rosenheim, Jeff L., "Thomas Eakins, Artist-Photographer, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art", Thomas Eakins and the Metropolitan Museum, page 45. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). During his study in Europe, he was exposed to the use of photography by the French realists, though the use of photography was still frowned upon as a shortcut by traditionalists. In the late 1870s he was introduced to the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, particularly the equine studies, and became interested in using the camera to study sequential movement. He performed his own motion studies, usually involving the nude figure, and even developed his own technique for capturing movement on film. Where Muybridge's system relied on a series of cameras triggered to produce a sequence of individual photographs, Eakins preferred to use a single camera to produce a series of exposures on one negative.

Eakins' so-called "Naked Series", which began in 1883, were nude photos of students and professional models which were taken to show real human anatomy from several specific angles, and were often hung up and displayed for study at the school. Later, less regimented poses were taken indoors and out, of men, women, and children, including his wife. The most provocative, and the only ones combining males and females, were nude photos of Eakins and a female model.

In all, about eight hundred photographs are now attributed to Eakins and his circle, most of which are figure studies, both clothed and nude, and portraits. No other American artist of his time matched Eakins' interest in photography, nor produced a comparable body of photographic works. 

After Eakins obtained a camera in 1880, several paintings are known to have been derived at least in part from his photographs. Some figures appear to be detailed transcriptions and tracings from the photographs by some device like a magic lantern, which Eakins took pains to cover up with oil paint.

 

Since the 1990s, Eakins has emerged as a major figure in sexuality studies in art history, for both the homoeroticism of his male nudes and for the complexity of his attitudes toward women. Controversy shaped much of his career as a teacher and as an artist. He insisted on teaching men and women "the same", used nude male models in female classes and vice versa, and was accused of abusing female students. Recent scholarship suggests that these scandals were grounded in more than the "puritanical prudery" of his contemporaries— as had once been assumed— and that Eakins's progressive academic principles may have protected unconscious and dubious agendas. These controversies may have been caused by a combination of factors such as the bohemianism of Eakins and his circle (in which students, for example, sometimes modeled in the nude for each other), the intensity and authority of his teaching style, and Eakins's inclination toward unorthodox or provocative behavior.

 

Thomas Eakins died on June 25, 1916.

 

July 23, 2016 /Photography News/ Egypt commemorates today - July 23, 2016 - the 64th anniversary of the 1952 Revolution which inspired other neighboring Arab and African countries to undertake social and economic reforms.

These photographs tell stories of Egyptian people who lead a simple life (long) before the 1952 Revolution. How did Egypt change over time?