Those of us who enjoy old-school chemical photography often need to calculate f-stop and exposure times. Of course you can use a ginormous table but there exists a solution from a more elegant age in which the sky can be purest blue above a very narrow old street. Marvel at Kaufmann's Posographe, a wonder of the analog age.
posted by LastOfHisKind on Dec 30, 2011 - 22 comments

Frank Kunert is happy his photographs have an “analog” look about them. After all, he did hand-make the models himself. Before the German photographer even snaps a single shot, he is in his studio, creating 3D model subjects — usually industrial grey constructs in still, almost poetic, settings — out of deco boards, plasticine, and paint. It could take weeks, even months, before Frank is fully satisfied. The result? Models that could could pass for the real thing, and photographs that portray complete worlds of their own.
posted by netbros on Nov 24, 2011 - 16 comments

The contraption was "created from a mishmash of lenses and computer parts and an old Super 8 movie camera." It was the size of a toaster, ran off "sixteen nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter" and took 23 seconds to record an image to cassette tape. But when Steve Sasson and his team of Kodak technicians presented the world's first digital camera to the public in 1975, they were asked: 'Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV?' [more inside]
posted by zarq on Aug 29, 2010 - 56 comments

Pioneering electronic artist Ben Laposky began creating his “Oscillons” – abstract artworks created by photographing Lissajous figures off a cathode-ray oscilloscope – in the early 1950’s. Some consider him the father of computer art, and the beauty and clarity of his work is astonishing.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot on Jan 23, 2007 - 12 comments