Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Vintage Photos Have Fun Art on the Reverse

Many vintage photos have interesting, business-like and fun art on the reverse, especially cabinet cards from 1870- 1890's. A cabinet card is about 4.25 x 6.5 inches in size. A CDV (carte de visite - from 1855-1880's) is smaller, usually 2.5 x 4 inches in size.

This CDV shows devils with a camera.

This cabinet card shows an angel on a camera.

Cabinet Card and CDV compared for size.


See many more examples in my gallery Vintage Photo Reverse Artistic Ads

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Peculiar Pear Pickers

I loaned my critter cam to a friend who lives in the country near Peculiar, Mo. He has been able to get images of coyote and deer and now some pear pickers. They were unaware that a camera was taking pictures as they picked. My friend was surprised to see the images when he checked the camera the next day, but the pear pickers are friends of his, so the law was not called!

See more still images and a time-lapse video I made in the The Peculiar Pear Pickers gallery.

Camera Themed Greeting Cards

I started collecting cameras and images in the early 1970's. Along the way, I picked up greeting cards using photography and cameras as themes.
My very favorite one is this early 1900's Thanksgiving post card. Note the macabre caption.


This old Valentine is 7" high and her eyes move when the hand with the heart is moved

See all the cards in the Camera Greeting Card Gallery

Monday, November 8, 2010

Photographers in Movies

Ally Sheedy played the part of a photojournalist in the 1993 movie Lethal Exposure, shot for tv by NBC. She takes a photo of a prisoner being killed in an airport. Later she flies to Paris to cover a trial and discovers a police officer involved in the case was also involved in the killing of the prisoner.  She then gets an incriminating photo of the officer.
I have not seen the movie so do not know how it ends, probably with negative and positive results. :~)


See more photogs in movies here.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Critter Cam Gets the Ghouls

I set up my critter cam tonight, Halloween, hoping to get a few trick or treaters. But we usually don't get any in our neighborhood. Maybe it is because we turn off all the lights in the house? A couple of ghastly bubble-brain ghouls looking for more than candy showed up. They seem to have noticed the infra-red radiation from the camera. Thankfully they didn't destroy the camera. They certainly had an effect on the image, distorting some of them.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

It Is Not Your Grandma's Halloween

A friend and I wanted to have a little fun on a friday night and chose to take a stroll through a Halloween costume store in Kansas. It was fun. Far out costumes, masks and weird statues of demented humans.





You may be asking how come the images look so weird? Well they look normal to me, at least that is what it looked like last night.
Really?
Yes. Maybe we shouldn't have eaten at that famous fast food place that can make you gain lots of weight if you eat only there for 30 days in a row! Maybe it messed up my brain.
Really?
No, just kidding, it really looked like this.
Really?
No, you got me, not really. Just my warped brain and an accident using Photoshop many years ago. Photo lesson time: take any photo, bring it into P.S. and choose the curves tool. Then start pulling the graph around slowly and to the extremes. Amazing things happen. Try it.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Photographers in Movies

Ed Sullivan worked as a columnist in the 1930's. He got the idea for a movie and submitted the story to a Hollywood studio, naming his movie "There Goes My Heart". The movie was made and released in 1938. It starred Fredric March as a reporter trying to get a photo of an heiress played by Virginia Bruce. He misses the chance as she sneaks away from her yacht, wanting to be on her own in the real world. She gets a job at a department store and makes some new friends. One scene shows her at an ice skating rink, where she wins some sort of skating competition. Remember, this is a screwball/romantic comedy, it does not have to make sense. A newspaper photographer still trying to get the photo uses what appears to be a 4x5 Speed Graphic on a tripod to take her photo. An excited spectator knocks his camera over(I think it is Fredric March as the reporter). In the film, the knocked over camera is never shown, just the photographer upset by what happens.







The reporter falls in love with the heiress and at the end they live happily ever after, as they used to say!