5 ms·

The First Photo of a Human Being, and How the Scene's Changed from 180 Years Ago

59 points by prismatic 8y ago

srge 8y ago
It’s mind blowing that we can see photos almost 200 years old. Had the technology been invented a little earlier and we could have had pictures of Napoleon or even of the French Revolution.
- culot 8y ago
  It's those 2000 year old photos that I hanker for. :) 200 years ago is magical, 2000 years ago would be incredible. Oh, to peruse the stinky streets of Herculaneum! Gosh, I hope humanity can keep it up for another 2000 years, keeping out heritage and history well-recorded.
  - modzu 8y ago
    well we have something better than photos from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians -- sculpture! ex. the bust of nefertiti (~1345 BC)
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      or a mummy
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Artists rendition. When I look at the bust of Nefertiti I like to imagine Nefertiti saying something like "destroy it, make the nose a little smaller, then execute the artist".
      - kqr 8y ago
        To be fair, that'd just as likely be true of a photograph as well. People in the digital age forget how much artistic freedom is granted by staging a photograph and later processing it in the darkroom.
- dogsh1t 8y ago
  Perhaps one day daylight "bent" by a sufficiently strong black hole and turned back toward the Earth can be collected and analyzed revealing pre-historic and possibly even ancient conditions of the world. Of course, this would be birds-eye, but who can fathom the ability of light to be analyzed by sensors developed several millennia hence. Man may one day obtain images of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, flocks of pterosaurs migrating, or something as detailed as Socrates being led off to prison for his execution.
dylan604 8y ago
I often use long exposure (with heavy ND filters) during the day for the specific purpose of removing people from the image. Cityscapes in a busy area is nearly impossible to not have people in the image which makes it difficult to sale the image. I'm only taking 20-30 seconds exposures vs the 7 minutes mentioned in the article, but it really makes eliminating the crowds a much more manageable task.
- amelius 8y ago
  This makes me wonder. Is there an algorithm that allows taking multiple short-exposure photos, and eliminating the moving parts by copy+pasting areas from different photos in the set?
  - dsego 8y ago
    just take the median
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    Photoshop does this. See your sister commenter.
- jedberg 8y ago
  Have you seen the technique where you take many quick photos over the course of a few minutes, and then use photoshop to create a single image of all the parts that don’t change? https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/remove-tourists-stack-mode/ https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/remove-tourists-stack-m...
  - ateesdalejr 8y ago
    Ah! I'd seen something like this but instead of photoshop they used Python+Pillow to XOR a bunch of images together.
  - dylan604 8y ago
    I am familiar with this technique, and it works well for a single still image. My end goal is rarely a single image as I'm usually shooting timelapse. Since it's timelapse, the motion blur still shows motion, but it also pretty much ensures nobody is identifiable.
culot 8y ago
BTW: The article linked is a composite of articles copy-and-pasted from these two sources: Mainly: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/this-is-the-first-ever-photograph-of-a-human-and-how-the-scene-it-was-taken-in-looks-today-9841706.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/this-... Additionally: https://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/#wmBIVmdSsgqk https://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/...
- netsharc 8y ago
  And uhm, wtf kinda copy and paste is it. If you think that photo is the same corner as it is today, hah, no. It's not the corner where the man had his shoe shined, it's just some other random piece of road. It's not even the picture from the Independent article. What the ????.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    The Wikipedia article [1] suggests that area of Paris has significantly changed since that photo was taken. I suspect that corner doesn't exist as such any more. (It's probably under the Place de la Republique.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_du_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_du_Temple
    - netsharc 8y ago
      I was bored and tried to find an old map of Paris, you're right, that street corner is now under the Place (if the info in the Wikipedia article is accurate). https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000856594/v0001.simple.selectedTab=record https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf000...
chacham15 8y ago
I wonder if that guy was thinking to himself "what a lousy morning, the shoe shiner took forever!"
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  "...and why is the hair on the back of my neck standing up?"
linkmotif 8y ago
> The man having his shoes shined can be seen in the bottom left. The man doing the shining can be seen too, right? This whole piece is ignoring that man? They both appear equally blurry
- jaredsohn 8y ago
  >This whole piece is ignoring that man? No it doesn't. The lede says "The earliest known photograph to include a recognizable human form". Later it says: >The exception is the man at the lower-left who sat still long enough to appear in the photograph. The person cleaning his boots is also visible, although not as distinctly. >It has been speculated that instead of a shoeshine boy, the man stood at a a pump. However, comparison with another image taken by Daguerre of the same spot at noon reveals boxes used to hold brushes and polishes. An image later is captioned 'The man having his boots shined, and the person doing the shining'.
mc32 8y ago
This first photograph is in the vein of “street photography,” yet it remains a genre underappreciated, with rare exceptions like the well known (by non photographers) Cartier-Bresson. Yet, there are countless documenting quotidian life.
ggm 8y ago
Two men: the shoeshine and the customer. D.O.Hill and Fox Talbot did caloptypes in Edinburgh. One is in Charlotte square, with a ghostly horse and man: man paid to hold horse while important person inside house.
etiennemarcel 8y ago
A better before/after taken from the same location: http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/boulevard_du_Temple_de_dag.html http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/boulevard_du_Temple_de_dag.ht...
s_weber 8y ago
Shameless plug for a project I am involved in: re.photos [1] is a collection of then and now pictures (also called rephotography [2]) created by the platform's users. It provides an interface to filter the pictures (e.g. geographically, temporally) and provides a basic tool to improve alignment of two pictures. Our user Nicolai Wolpert contributed particularly impressive pictures of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris [3]. See the comparison of the Quai des Nations in 1900 and 2017 [4] if you are in a hurry. We feel that rephotography is a great tool to make history more tangible to a greater audience. Sometimes it's difficult to visualize that and how people lived in the past; seeing those two pictures taken in different times makes changes (and consistency) in peoples' lives much more accessible. When taking after pictures this effect is even more pronounced. It's fascinating to know that some photographer stood in the same place decades or a century ago. ;-) This is mostly a passion-driven project at the moment, so it might be rough around the edges in some places. In particular there isn't a mobile view yet for most functionality, so I'd recommend using a larger screen. [1] https://www.re.photos/ https://www.re.photos/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephotography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephotography [3] https://www.re.photos/compilation/?tag=190 https://www.re.photos/compilation/?tag=190 [4] https://www.re.photos/compilation/1450/ https://www.re.photos/compilation/1450/

59 points by prismatic 8y ago

srge 8y ago

It’s mind blowing that we can see photos almost 200 years old. Had the technology been invented a little earlier and we could have had pictures of Napoleon or even of the French Revolution.

culot 8y ago
It's those 2000 year old photos that I hanker for. :) 200 years ago is magical, 2000 years ago would be incredible. Oh, to peruse the stinky streets of Herculaneum! Gosh, I hope humanity can keep it up for another 2000 years, keeping out heritage and history well-recorded.
- modzu 8y ago
  well we have something better than photos from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians -- sculpture! ex. the bust of nefertiti (~1345 BC)
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    or a mummy
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Artists rendition. When I look at the bust of Nefertiti I like to imagine Nefertiti saying something like "destroy it, make the nose a little smaller, then execute the artist".
    - kqr 8y ago
      To be fair, that'd just as likely be true of a photograph as well. People in the digital age forget how much artistic freedom is granted by staging a photograph and later processing it in the darkroom.
dogsh1t 8y ago
Perhaps one day daylight "bent" by a sufficiently strong black hole and turned back toward the Earth can be collected and analyzed revealing pre-historic and possibly even ancient conditions of the world. Of course, this would be birds-eye, but who can fathom the ability of light to be analyzed by sensors developed several millennia hence. Man may one day obtain images of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, flocks of pterosaurs migrating, or something as detailed as Socrates being led off to prison for his execution.

dylan604 8y ago

I often use long exposure (with heavy ND filters) during the day for the specific purpose of removing people from the image. Cityscapes in a busy area is nearly impossible to not have people in the image which makes it difficult to sale the image. I'm only taking 20-30 seconds exposures vs the 7 minutes mentioned in the article, but it really makes eliminating the crowds a much more manageable task.

amelius 8y ago
This makes me wonder. Is there an algorithm that allows taking multiple short-exposure photos, and eliminating the moving parts by copy+pasting areas from different photos in the set?
- dsego 8y ago
  just take the median
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Photoshop does this. See your sister commenter.
jedberg 8y ago
Have you seen the technique where you take many quick photos over the course of a few minutes, and then use photoshop to create a single image of all the parts that don’t change? https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/remove-tourists-stack-mode/ https://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/remove-tourists-stack-m...
- ateesdalejr 8y ago
  Ah! I'd seen something like this but instead of photoshop they used Python+Pillow to XOR a bunch of images together.
- dylan604 8y ago
  I am familiar with this technique, and it works well for a single still image. My end goal is rarely a single image as I'm usually shooting timelapse. Since it's timelapse, the motion blur still shows motion, but it also pretty much ensures nobody is identifiable.

culot 8y ago

BTW: The article linked is a composite of articles copy-and-pasted from these two sources: Mainly: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/this-is-the-first-ever-photograph-of-a-human-and-how-the-scene-it-was-taken-in-looks-today-9841706.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/this-... Additionally: https://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/#wmBIVmdSsgqk https://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/...

netsharc 8y ago
And uhm, wtf kinda copy and paste is it. If you think that photo is the same corner as it is today, hah, no. It's not the corner where the man had his shoe shined, it's just some other random piece of road. It's not even the picture from the Independent article. What the ????.
- ghaff 8y ago
  The Wikipedia article [1] suggests that area of Paris has significantly changed since that photo was taken. I suspect that corner doesn't exist as such any more. (It's probably under the Place de la Republique.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_du_Temple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_du_Temple
  - netsharc 8y ago
    I was bored and tried to find an old map of Paris, you're right, that street corner is now under the Place (if the info in the Wikipedia article is accurate). https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000856594/v0001.simple.selectedTab=record https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf000...

chacham15 8y ago

I wonder if that guy was thinking to himself "what a lousy morning, the shoe shiner took forever!"

DonHopkins 8y ago
"...and why is the hair on the back of my neck standing up?"

linkmotif 8y ago

> The man having his shoes shined can be seen in the bottom left. The man doing the shining can be seen too, right? This whole piece is ignoring that man? They both appear equally blurry

jaredsohn 8y ago
>This whole piece is ignoring that man? No it doesn't. The lede says "The earliest known photograph to include a recognizable human form". Later it says: >The exception is the man at the lower-left who sat still long enough to appear in the photograph. The person cleaning his boots is also visible, although not as distinctly. >It has been speculated that instead of a shoeshine boy, the man stood at a a pump. However, comparison with another image taken by Daguerre of the same spot at noon reveals boxes used to hold brushes and polishes. An image later is captioned 'The man having his boots shined, and the person doing the shining'.

mc32 8y ago

This first photograph is in the vein of “street photography,” yet it remains a genre underappreciated, with rare exceptions like the well known (by non photographers) Cartier-Bresson. Yet, there are countless documenting quotidian life.

ggm 8y ago

Two men: the shoeshine and the customer. D.O.Hill and Fox Talbot did caloptypes in Edinburgh. One is in Charlotte square, with a ghostly horse and man: man paid to hold horse while important person inside house.

etiennemarcel 8y ago

A better before/after taken from the same location: http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/boulevard_du_Temple_de_dag.html http://www.niepce-daguerre.com/boulevard_du_Temple_de_dag.ht...

s_weber 8y ago

Shameless plug for a project I am involved in: re.photos [1] is a collection of then and now pictures (also called rephotography [2]) created by the platform's users. It provides an interface to filter the pictures (e.g. geographically, temporally) and provides a basic tool to improve alignment of two pictures. Our user Nicolai Wolpert contributed particularly impressive pictures of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris [3]. See the comparison of the Quai des Nations in 1900 and 2017 [4] if you are in a hurry. We feel that rephotography is a great tool to make history more tangible to a greater audience. Sometimes it's difficult to visualize that and how people lived in the past; seeing those two pictures taken in different times makes changes (and consistency) in peoples' lives much more accessible. When taking after pictures this effect is even more pronounced. It's fascinating to know that some photographer stood in the same place decades or a century ago. ;-) This is mostly a passion-driven project at the moment, so it might be rough around the edges in some places. In particular there isn't a mobile view yet for most functionality, so I'd recommend using a larger screen. [1] https://www.re.photos/ https://www.re.photos/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephotography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rephotography [3] https://www.re.photos/compilation/?tag=190 https://www.re.photos/compilation/?tag=190 [4] https://www.re.photos/compilation/1450/ https://www.re.photos/compilation/1450/