Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

SMILE! You're on hidden camera

 


(Why surveillance and "secret" photography is NOT a new thing!)

Secret Street Photos in the 1890s Taken by a Student with a Hidden Camera

Dec 23, 2018 Steve Palace

Norwegian Carl Størmer became a force to be reckoned with in the fields of math and astrophysics. But he also had other interests.

Every great mind starts somewhere and it was the business of photography that caught his eye… quite literally.

While studying mathematics at the University of Oslo (formerly the Royal Frederick University, Kristiania) he found himself dabbling in the fine art of taking snaps.




Carl Størmer. Photo by Nasjonalbiblioteket CC BY 2.0

Yet these were no ordinary pictures. Burgeoning talent that he was, 19-year-old Størmer used the historical equivalent of the spy cam to capture city life at its most naturalistic.

QUESTION: OK, so was he a brilliant innovator or just a sneaky little bastard? And what ELSE did he photograph without the subject's knowledge or approval? I must have a suspicious mind. 


Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Marilyn Monroe - RARE Version Of "I Hate A Careless Man "





I wasn't looking for this, at all - but strangely enough, it relates to what I WAS looking for: pictures from a photo shoot Marilyn Monroe did with Harold Lloyd in 1953. As a matter of fact, this video was taken during one of those sessions, as I was to find out on another site:

"It has been a puzzle to Marilyn fans for many years: the brief video clip where a swimsuit-clad MM, reclining on a poolside lounger, purrs, ‘I hate a careless man.’ It was shot at the home of Harold Lloyd, the silent movie comedian turned cheesecake photographer, in 1953. But little more was known about it. Now Immortal Marilyn‘s April VeVea has found the source of the mystery footage…

“Recently I was going through Marilyn Monroe’s IMDB page under the ‘Archive Footage’ tab. I was surprised to see her listed under a 1995 documentary, narrated by William Shatner, called Trinity and Beyond – The Atomic Bomb Movie. In it, a short 1953 PSA [Public Service Announcement], that was only shown to members of the United States Air Force, called Security is Common Sense is shown at the 47:35 mark. The PSA talks about using common sense measures when dealing with government secrets such as ‘avoiding loose talk, safeguarding top secret information, reporting security violations at once, and avoiding writing about top secret information when writing home.’ At 48:39 who pops up but Marilyn herself to end the PSA!”







I am actually not a big Marilyn fan, but I need to keep feeding my Harold Lloyd Facebook page (for some reason - it has not resulted in a single book sale), so I decided to explore the Marilyn photo shoot a little further. What's surprising about these poses is the modesty of her strapless coral bathing suit, which she fills out with juicy peach-flesh sexiness - just Harold's kind of woman, busty and generous of thigh. But the really spectacular thing is - the shoes. The SHOES! I'm not even a shoe maven, but those towering Lucite platforms are enough to convert me. Tied on with Grecian crossed ribbons, they are truly the footwear of a goddess. I am sure in the above pose Harold was instructing her, "Now hold that foot out so they can see the shoe!" Whether Harold slept with her is a matter for conjecture, but apparently he "did" a lot of his models - or they did him, in some fashion, of which I have some idea. To be honest, Marilyn gave the best blow jobs in Hollywood, was not at all shy about performing them, and it took her very far.









































Saturday, November 7, 2015

Here she is. . . Miss Muybridge




This is becoming extremely addictive. Though it's a tedious process reassembling Muybridge's multiple images, look what happens when they're put back together in sequence! As with the others, I took the sheet of tiny black-and-white pictures, copied it a zillion times, cut the pictures apart into individual frames, then ran them in sequence in my gif program to create animation.

Whoever this model was, this young woman who died over 100 years ago, here she is alive and moving again. And this was long before the conventional movie camera came along. This was merely motion study achieved through the use of conventional still photography. Reassembled, however primitively, into motion again.




As with any gif, before they drive you completely nuts, they reveal a lot because the eye picks up on things you would normally not notice. Note that she isn't moving her arms. They seem very stiff, in fact. One wonders if Muybridge has told her to keep them at her sides, or if she's just feeling uncomfortable walking around nude in front of a dirty old man with 100 cameras. Women then were suffocatingly over-clad in skirts, corsets, petticoats, bustles, pantaloons, and whatever-the-hell-else-they-wore. Their bodies were conditioned to carry both weight (of clothing) and bulk, length. Restriction was the norm. And being completely covered up. The average modern woman would probably feel self-conscious walking around nude in front of a camera, so imagine how difficult it must have been for a Victorian girl. I note also that her head is, while not down, then not exactly up either. Modesty was a very big thing then, and holding her head up while nude would be unseemly. It moves stiffly along with the rest of her as she executes her awkward turn.




What amazes me about these things is how few frames there are, yet what a relatively fluid sense of motion results, without the expected jerkiness. I am not sure what that is about. I know movie film is an illusion, just a series of stills, but this - man, this is primitive! Is it my imagination, or is there something in her left hand? And what? I get the eeriest sense I know her, that I know something about her just from this captured crumb of time. What would cause her to do this type of work, and do her parents know about it? Or are they in on it, perhaps? Muybridge had his dogged followers, and men got away with scandalous things during the Victorian era. It was a time of great hypocrisy, with prostitution rampant, along with social diseases. A powerful man like Muybridge could easily get his hooks into any number of tender young maidens.




When you look at his studies of women, they all seem to look the same - slim, small-breasted and (shockingly) young. Some look to be teenagers. Were they doing this in the name of science? For a lark? For a few bucks? To say they'd done it? For whatever reason, they did it, they bared their waxen-looking bodies for posterity, executing stiff and self-conscious turns that they probably couldn't imagine would still be looked at more than a century later. (And could they even imagine the concept of a gif? Perhaps Muybridge could.)




As I endlessly copied and cropped this oddly unbending young woman, I kept seeing Sylvia Plath. Don't know why - the hair, the face. The attitude of oppression and defeat, and mixed in with it, naked defiance.





POST-POST. . . (post)

As usual, as always with these things, there is More. Much as this may look like one of those 78 rpm records from my early childhood, it is in fact a Muybridge gizmo (that's the technical term) used in tandem with his odd stop-motion photographs.




I wasn't going to get into the zoopraxiscope because it sounded like something you might use for a rectal exam, but it's worth mentioning because as it turns out, Muybridge did develop a primitive means of projecting his photographic images. It was done in a cumbersome fashion, and the resulting "movies" must have been only a couple of seconds long, but to Victorian audiences it must have been a marvel.

"The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892–1894, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement." (Wikipedia)





In the following years all kinds of people (all of them men) worked on the principles of photographing/projecting moving bodies. Thus came the kinetoscope, the mutoscope, and any number of other scopes (not to mention the zoetrope), but Muybridge was ahead of the game, not so much inventing the study of motion but developing it to the point that he made a significant contribution.

Besides that? You have to credit the man with this: he (quite literally) got away with murder.



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The Muybridge jumping horse: look what I did!




This was an experiment in Muybridge animation, which is certainly not a new idea. Most of the Muybridge photos display all the frames consecutively, which is (I think) the way most people would view them. Putting them together into a sort of primitive motion picture came much later.

Well, this is my attempt, and a pretty good one I think, at taking one of these sheets of tiny photos - this one, to be specific:




. . . cropping the little square photos into - little square photos, and putting it all together with Makeagif, which will take any sequence of photos (who knows how many) and make a teeny-tiny slide show out of it.

The motion here is actually not too bad. The square photos made the cropping less tedious than you'd think (considering I had to do it 12 times).

But there are some strange things about this little photographic cartoon from the 1880s. The fact that the rider appears to be nude isn't so unusual, nor is the fact that he's not using a saddle. Muybridge liked his models (male or female) to show lots of skin, not for prurient reasons but to display natural skeletal and muscular movement without impediment.

No, it's that jump. The horse seems to jump over it before it appears. Something strange going on here. People often accused Muybridge of "fiddling", tweaking his images somehow to impress the public, and he really wasn't a scientist or an inventor - not at the start, anyway. But then, neither was Edison.

Maybe it's just the way I'm seeing it. Maybe it's the way I cropped the photos (but since they were all perfectly square, that part of it was relatively easy).

Anyway, I was all set to go watch TV or go on Facebook or do some other moronic thing, when I looked at the Muybridge images again and noticed how many exotic animals he had forced to walk through all those elaborate tripwires. Including. . . one of my favorite animals of all time, the capybara!

Yes, the Muybridge capybara. This is what I found:




This is what the photos looked like, copied and cropped apart 4" x 3":





















. . . and here is the finished gif, spliced together by my magic Makeagif program:




He's a little drunken, a little wobbly, but then he's about 130 years old, and photographed with the most primitive equipment imagineable. And it's really not bad, for only nine frames a second.


Saturday, May 31, 2014

The best thing I've seen on Facebook



http://news.distractify.com/culture/x-history-photos/?v=1

I posted this, then for some reason unposted it, and I'm finding it on Facebook so much that I decided to post it again. It's 60 very interesting pictures - some historical, others poppish, most of them intriguing or startling. I've pulled out just a few that jumped out at me.




Most of these don't have dates, but I would imagine this is 1940s: the very first computer, filling a whole room. Intimidating, and ugly, without a touch screen. As the verse says (Ogden Nash, perhaps?): "Clack clack/went the Univac".




The MGM lion. He has his own hairdresser, obviously.




A teenage Bill Gates grinning after some minor driving infraction. The Biebs has nothing on him.




The Beatles clowning with Ali.




Brando with King. We made fun of him then.




I'd say these are photoshopped, except that they're not. Castro and Malcolm X.




Ali talking down a would-be suicide.




A partially-completed Mount Rushmore. (This one amazes me, but somebody had to do it - even if I can never quite believe it).




Shaken, not stirred. 




Robin Williams shows off his hairy chest, pre-Mrs. Doubtfire.




Amelia Earhart's last hair cut. Chilling.




Bill Clinton and JFK. Some similarities there.




So why would Audrey Hepburn be grocery shopping? It's even stranger than her pet deer. Obviously posed, but intriguing.




Pablo Picasso with Brigitte Bardot. Creepy to the max.




Drew Barrymore cuddling on Stephen Spielberg's lap. Well. . . a bit creepy now, but probably not then.




A young Hemingway's passport. It would take him far.




My personal fave: three of the four Beatles in 1958, barely out of their skiffle phase, dressed in natty three-piece suits for a wedding gig. Note John's Little Richard hair.