Historical

I am hardly the first person in the industry to prattle on and on about why you should print your photos, but I think it is worth mentioning, here today, some things you may not have considered about your digital files. After all, either by intent or just circumstance, we've all been led to believe that our digital files are "safe forever", especially if we've gone to great lengths to back them up on secure drives or on cloud servers and such. But, are they really all that safe?

The world's eyes have been on climbing lately. With the recent incredible 19 day climb of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite Valley and now this, the Red Bull sponsored venture of scaling the frozen heights of Niagara Falls, climbing is producing some increasingly spectacular imagery. Canadian climber William Gadd became the first to ascend these icy walls - a dangerous stunt leaving us with incredible video and photos!

San Francisco, a city of picture-postcard beauty wasn’t always as pretty as it is today. Semi-industrial ‘wastelands’, like the South of Market (SoMA) neighborhood, have been transformed into expensive, hip hoods, filled with tech firms and wealthy tech workers living in luxury condos. Let’s cast our mind back to a time not long ago, a time before the internet and the associated tech money that has changed the city so dramatically, and remember what San Francisco used to look like.

In late 2014 at an auction in Ohio, Levi Bettweiser of the Rescued Film Project, stumbled upon one of his greatest finds. Up for bid were 31 rolls of 70 year old undeveloped film from World War 2 shot by an unknown soldier and photographer. The Rescued Film Project is an effort to find and salvage undeveloped film from as early as the 1930's. They strive to recover even those films which are damaged by age or the elements, as in the case of this large find of film from WW2.

I don't know how I ran into this here on the eve of 2015, but I am glad I did. Product photography has never been particularly easy to do well, and I love being reminded of the fact that it used to all be done without extensive use of Adobe Photoshop CC14. These images, shot by Kim David McNeill Simmons for toymaker Kenner between 1977 and 1985, showcase basically my childhood: Star Wars toys.

From 1920-1956, Ernst Leitz II was the head of Leica Camera, but perhaps his most impressive achievement took place from 1933-1939 when Leitz and his family rescued hundreds of Jews by smuggling them out of Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Leitz, concerned for the safety of many of his Jewish employees, transferred them (along with retailers, family members and friends of family members) out of the country to sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States.

Have you ever wondered what fashion trends will be in style, let’s say 20 years from now? Well some say the best way to predict the future is to look at the past, and this video does exactly that. "100 Years of Beauty in 1 Minute" illustrates hair and makeup styles from each decade, starting at 1910 straight through to 2010.

You never know what’s going to happen in New York. Last week, photographic gold was struck in Times Square in the deep cavernous archives inside the Conde Nast building. Two thousand prints shot by Edward Steichen, one of 20th Century’s most influential photographers, were found after lying hidden for over eighty years. The story behind them, and of Steichen’s rise to photographic fame and acclaim, are almost too unbelievable to be true.