Tag: history

September 2026 Links

The 1-Inch Sensor Is Not One Inch, and the Name Is a 70-Year-Old Fossil ­— what size actually is a 1-inch sensor?

What is ISO invariance, and should I care? — Should you?`

Woodland Photography for Beginners: The Basics That Really Matter When You’re Just Starting Out — Getting started with woodland photography.

Thanks to Nikon, Canon’s Closed RF Mount Could Be Forced Open — An explanation of why Viltrox doesn’t produce Nikon Z or Canon RF lenses: these companies are trolling with patent. Nikon’s got invalidated in China though. When you can’t compete, you just bully.

Full Frame Is 24x36mm Because a Leitz Engineer Doubled a Movie Frame in 1913 — It always boil down to a decision taken a long time ago.

The ColorChecker, a Photographer’s Best and Most Colorful Friend, Turns 50 Years Old — It didn’t realise this was so old.

Sask. company uses new technology to preserve memories caught on film — (From March 2026) Restoring / digitising film is important. So Film Rescue International developed a new device to digitise film, including old film that was left unprocessed.

Exhibits

‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’: Unraveling Photography’s Most Famous Mystery — An historical review the image. It’s a workplace safety violation, for sure.

Inside Lenne Chai’s Nostalgic Vision of a Queer Singapore

Nicolas Rachline’s Haunting Photos Capture the Solitude and Beauty of Modern Life — A new book.

The Winners of the 2026 Pure Street Photography Awards Invoke Happenstance and Commotion — Some very nice photography.

Film

Seems like Petapixel has been posting a lot about film lately.

We Are Living in a Panoramic Film Renaissance — New panoramic film cameras that are not the WideluxX.

The Excellent Kodak Ultramax 400 Is an Unfortunate Victim of Bad Branding — Spoiler: it is just Gold in 400.

Kodak Gold is Somehow Both Very Popular and Underappreciated — I have shot the old Gold from the 90s. I have a box of Gold in 120 to try out.

Kodak Ektar 100 Brings Fine Grain and Vivid Color Saturation — A fine film. Shot many times mostly in 120. And on the olden days it was a high sensitivity film.

GoPro

Following RIP GoPro:

Markiplier Says He Is ‘Genuinely Sad’ About GoPro’s Merger — Markiplier just happened to have become the single biggest shareholder of GoPro days before the anoouncement. One notable quote:

“If [GoPro] stops making cameras or starts making Flock-based cameras, I am out 100%,” Fischbach says.

GoPro’s Founder Promises It Isn’t Done Making Consumer Cameras — Just words.

DIY

This New Open-Source Camera Has Swappable Sensors and Lens Mounts — This project is not DIY as it comes from a company named Circuit Valley but it sure feels like it could be and encourages it with its open-source nature. Interesting concept. Digital Camera World also talks about it: In a world-first, this open system is a camera tinkerer’s dream with swappable sensors, global shutter options, programmable software, AND multiple lens mounts.

The first digital camera

Back in December 2025, BBC featured A ‘toaster with a lens’: The story behind the first handheld digital camera:

In 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. Photography would never be the same again.

In a short summary, the first digital camera was invented at Kodak by Steve Sasson. Not because Sasson was asked to do it, but because, as a new hire, his first assignment was to checkout these new CCD chips. The bulky black and white camera took 100×100 pixels picture stored onto a cassette tape, to view the tape was read back for the image to be displayed on a TV. And business people always so this as a shift in the business if it every took. But in 1975 this was definitely not ready for anything, It needed hundred times more pixel to match even Instamatic 110 — which was the smallest format, before Kodak Disc.

Kodak had the future in their hands, but didn’t know what to do. It’s not that they did nothing, but what advance they had, they lost it as the competition caught up. After producing the first DSLRs with Nikon and Canon, making a good number of point and shoot cameras, and creating with Olympus the Four-Third format, they lost to the market and filed for bankruptcy in 2012, at which point they sold of a lot of business divisions, including the sensors.

After having emerged from bankruptcy over a decade ago, Kodak remains one of the few film manufacturers left in the world, while a lot of Kodak branded products are just that: branded. Fortunately Kodak seems to want continuing making film in a market that has completely shrunk, and for which its main competitor, Fujifilm, mostly withdrew.

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar photos

First View of Earth from Moon - reprocessed

Wired has an article on The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos :

[…] After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.

They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, […]

Read it all, the effort is amazing. It doesn’t matter how you keep the medium, if you can re-read it or decode it, it is useless.

This is a shape of things to come. What will happen to all of those digital archives? These CD or DVD that will be unreadable because we no longer have the drives, or just decayed, these hard drives with obsolete connectors, which, if they ever start, might still hard to use in a few decades. And then what do we do with these RAW files that the camera vendor refuse to document?

These are all the questions we should remember to ask. The next Vivian Maier might never happen in the era of digital as we might unable to recover the content of the shoe box. Not everybody will have the skills of that team that recovered the NASA photos.

Kodak DCS

The Kodak DCS is Kodak 1991 Digital SLR based on a Nikon F3. Kodak was pioneer in the area and Nikonweb interview James McGarvey who designed these.

Six models were priced from $20,000 to $25,000. A total of 987 units were sold from 1991 to 1994.

But:

Many people in Kodak were reluctant. Some of top management tried to stop our business, but some wisdom prevailed and they did not succeed.

That’s right, they were scared to disrupt their own business. But it got disrupted by the competition and now we see were Kodak is: between the rock and the hard place.

Kodachrome 2010

A small documentary “Kodachrome 2010” by Xander Robin, with an interview of Dwayne’s Photo lab manager and how it came to an end.

The video was taken down on YouTube due to a copyright claim.

Robert Cohen found his last roll of Kodachrome and went to the Missouri fair to shoot it ; then drove down to Dwayne’s to get it processed, anxiously waiting to see if the film had any picture on it.

My biggest regret is to not have shot Kodachrome more often. I think that the 3 weeks turnaround in France was part of what turned me off.

Polaroid, something that was impossible

Technologizer relate the story of the Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible:

Most important, unlike any other Polaroid, the SX-70 asked the photographer to do nothing more than focus, press the shutter, and pluck the snapshot as it emerged from the camera — and then watch it develop in daylight. It was the first camera to realize what Edwin Land said had been his dream all along: “absolute one-step photography.”

This was in 1972 and it was a landmark towards the true instant photography. Long before digital.