Photography

Family Photography Museum

A wonderful window into the dynamics of typical family photography over the course of a century, from the late 1800’s through the 1990s. The Family Museum is a photo archive of amateur photography from typical families in the UK. The curators have had several exhibits across the UK showing off samples of the more than 25,000 photos that they have accumulated as part of the project

Co-founded in 2017 by filmmaker Nigel Shephard and editor Rachael Moloney, The Family Museum is an archival photography project that evolved from research for a book, A History of Family Photography. This research was rooted in Nigel’s collection of around 25,000 original British amateur family photographs and 300 photo albums, dating from the 1850s to the noughties, put together by Nigel over a period of 30 years.

Through sharing more than a century and a half of found images and visual stories about everyday life and experiences, we believe The Family Museum is a unique resource that can inspire the imagination and connect people. Using our archive as a starting point, we want to explore our understanding of ‘family’ as expressed through vernacular photography, and take the opportunity this collection offers for further research into the history and practice of amateur photography.

The Family Museum – www.familymuseum.co.uk

As someone who has direct roots in the UK, some of the photos from the 1960s through the 1980s in this archive feel extremely familiar to me (similar to the color one above). The modest style of the homes and decor look exactly like the houses of my relatives when I went to the UK to visit them as a kid. Projects like this are so fascinating to me and really open up a window into typical family life from the past century. The site has numerous posts that go deep into the context of several sets within the vast collection including one about a typical British wedding and one detailing the courtship of a Spanish woman and a British man right after World War II. Love stuff like this!

Nat Geo Travel Photo Contest Winners

Below are a few of the fantastic photos that were chosen as the winners of the National Geographic Travel Photo contest. The contest is open to anyone and the full gallery of submissions and winners is pretty amazing. The photo immediately below of a small fishing village in Greenland is just beautiful and one of my favorite photos.

Fishing Village in Greenland
San Francisco Airport On A Windy Day

Stanley Kubrick. Photographer.

Leonard Bernstein lounging

Before Stanley Kubrick was Stanley Kubrick he was a photographer for Look Magazine in NYC. The Museum of the City of NY has posted about 42 pages of Kubrick’s photos from his five year stint at the magazine and you can clearly see the beginnings of what will become a most legendary film career.

Zero Mostel looking sullen
Advertising painters on 42nd Street @ NYPL
Boys talking to a Mom.

Kubrick took some really interesting photos including many of Rocky Marciano, Dwight D. Eisenhower, many around Columbia University, and many ‘slice of NYC life’ photos. The collection is a really nice window into how NYC life was like back in the 1940s.

h/t: Vintage Everyday, DeMilked, Museum of City of NY – Kubrick collection

Never Before Seen Photos from 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests

goddess_crowd

A really amazing set of black and white photos (Yes, kids they did have color photos back then) taken during the Tiananmen Square protests in China 25 years ago. The story of the discovery of the photos is typical of other similar types of amazing discoveries – an undeveloped roll of film was discovered in a shoebox.

Source: Buzzfeed and The China Girls

New York City Day to Night

Super cool photo set depicting New York City moving from Day to Night in one photo. Basically, the photographer took a huge set of photos from the same position over the course of a day and then layered them together to show the transition. The above one of the Flatiron Building is one of my favorites since the building itself is a natural divider between day and night.

Via Amusing Planet

Pencil vs Camera

A very cool and creative set of photos titled Pencil vs. Camera, where a pencil drawing is superimposed on a real life scene and then the author took a photo, displaying a seamlessly integrated scene of the drawing and the photo. Super cool!

Updated Hack: Send to Flickr via Picasa

I, like many folks, am a regular user of Google’s Picasa. I am also an avid fan of Yahoo’s Flickr. And being that both of the parent companies of these two fine services are locked in a steel-cage death match for worldwide Internet dominance, I am not going to hold my breath for a plug-in that will enable me to easily upload photos from Picasa to Flickr.

In searching for a straight forward work around to more easily upload photos from Picasa to Flickr when a) I just want to share and b) am not too concerned about photo quality, I found a python script via Lifehacker, which is way too much advanced coding for me to deal with, and a work around where I can email photos to Flickr via Gmail (emailing photos is a default option in Picasa), a seemingly far easier option. In reading the email option article, I went and tried out this option with great success (more details on Flickr’s email uploading functionality can be found here, here and here). It seemed far easier than dealing with Python code. I think it degrades the quality of the photo slightly, but for purely sharing purposes, it does the trick.

I also saw a couple of things that I’d like to humbly add on to this article:

  1. Brilliantly, Flickr has now enabled you to tag photos that you upload via email. Simply include the syntax in your subject line or body: tag: tag_1 tag_2 tag_n and automagically, your photos will be uploaded and tagged on Flickr. Slick, very slick.
  2. By default, the Picasa/Gmail email solution reduces the photo sizes to 480 px wide. To upload photos to Flickr as close to the original size of your digital photo, fire up Picasa, go to Tools > Options > Email and where it says “When sending more than one photo, resize to:” select 1024 px. You will still see a slight dip in photo quality when your photo is uploaded to Flickr, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. The photo won’t be the original size but you really don’t need massive 6 megapixel photos sitting up on an online photo sharing service anyway, unless you are a pro or semi-pro photographer.
  3. Finally, now that you can effectively use Gmail to upload photos to Flickr, a minor issue arises in that you can rapidly use up lots of disc space sending these big files via Gmail. Now, Gmail does have endless disc space, but for those that are find it important not to waste useful disc space, here is a little add on pointer: Set up a filter in Gmail, where all emails sent To your personal Flickr email are automatically Deleted. Simply go through the Gmail Filter wizard, putting your Flickr upload email into the “To” field, and then select “Delete It”. From there, every time you send a bunch of photos to Flickr via Gmail, the “sent” email is automatically routed to the Delete tag in Gmail. All the information contained within the email is brilliantly copied and integrated into your Flickr account, so there is no need to keep those emails. Next time you clear out your old emails, those memory hogging emails to Flickr are quickly and painlessly deleted as well.

So those are my few additions to the articles I found on hacking Picasa and Flickr with Gmail. It’s not the prettiest solution in the world, but for a quick and easy way to get photos from Picasa to Flickr, it’s pretty hard to beat.