Tag: photography

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Images on the Web Museums Photography

Art Institute of Chicago Announces New Alfred Stieglitz Collection Website

The Department of Photography announced this week a new website focused on the museum’s Alfred Stieglitz photography collection. The interactive collection features high-quality reproductions of all 244 photographs in the collection gifted by his widow, Goergia O’Keefe in 1949. The majority of prints are by Stieglitz himself, but also by Ansel Adam, Julia Margaret Cameran, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, and many others in his circle. Furthermore, the site highlights new conservation analysis, 900 images, scholarly essays, and downloadable files. Explore the site at media.artic.edu/stieglitz

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Architecture Image Quality Luna Medieval Photography

French Cathedrals in the Lantern Slide Collection

The Visual Resources Center recently added a beautiful group of French medieval cathedrals to the publicly available Lantern Slide Collection. These images are some of the finest examples of large format architectural photography in the collection. We continue to add images to the Luna collection on a regular basis, so check back in to see what’s new!

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Images on the Web Luna Photography VRC

The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive Now Available in LUNA

The VRC is excited to announce its new publicly available LUNA collection, Images of Black Chicago: The Robert Sengstacke Photography Archive.  Born in Chicago on May 29, 1943, Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke is one of the city’s most prolific documentary photographers who is best known for capturing the African American experience.  Having grown up in the newspaper business (he is the grand-nephew of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender), Sengstacke was able to learn from established African American photographers at a young age and had unique access to important events and people.  With the help of Art History Professor Rebecca Zorach, the VRC has scanned over 3,000 negatives featuring the artistic community and street life of Chicago’s South Side in the late 1960’s. To obtain high resolution images and permission contact Robert A. Sengstacke (robert.sengstacke@gmail.com or 773-744-7487).

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Images on the Web Museums News Photography VRC

The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

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Image Quality Photography Software VRC

Photoshop: Cutting Out the Background

Have you ever wanted to eliminate the distracting background from an object photographed on-site?  Cutting out the background can be very easy or a bit challenging, depending on how complex the image is. The magic wand tool can be a very effective tool when your background is simple in nature.

Step-by-step:

1. Select the magic wand tool from the toolbar.

2. Click on the area you want to sample. The magic wand will outline the area with flashing dotted lines.

3. Initially, the magic wand may only pick up some of the background. Hold the Shift key  and continue clicking on the areas to add to the selection until the object is isolated.

4. Use the Exposure tool to adjust the background to white or black, pulling it to the far right for white or far left for black.

5. You may need to use the clone tool or paintbrush to clean-up areas that the magic wand tool missed.

 

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Photography VRC

Luminous Lint

Luminous Lint is an expansive photography resource that includes images and text about historic and contemporary photographic practice, as well as artist biographies, styles and movements, thematic content, information about printing techniques and processes, and chronological information about the history of the medium.

The website also features images of artworks as well as artists’ monographs, making it a great starting place to research photographers or photographic movements.

For more information, check out Luminous Lint!

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Museums News Photography

Getty Releases New Atlas of Photo Processes

The Getty Conservation Institute recently released a new resource called the Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes, which provides a growing collection of in-depth PDF guides of various photographic processes and their variants. The goal of the project is to help researchers and those working with photography collections correctly identify the photographic process of specific prints in their collections so as to make the safest decisions regarding the conservation, exhibition, and storage of the works.

The Atlas currently contains guides to eleven processes, including Albumen, Silver Gelatin, and Photogravure, and combines historic information about the process with information about how artists were using the technique in the darkroom, as well as contemporary conservation science knowledge.

For more information, explore the Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes.

Via ArtDaily

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News Photography VRC

Largest Film Camera in the World in Chicago

The world’s largest film camera is currently at Two North Riverside Plaza, and will be there through Thursday, October 31. The camera was built in order to be used in a project by photographer Dennis Manarchy, from Rockford, IL, called Butterflies & Buffalo: Tales of American Culture.

The camera is 35 feet long, and makes photographs that are larger than life size—more than six feet tall and four feet wide! Manarchy’s project is to make portraits to document at least 50 distinct cultural groups in the United States and plans to travel more than 20,000 miles in order to capture such wide diversity. I’m curious about how they’ll make a darkroom big enough to develop a piece of film that’s bigger than they are!

For more information, visit the Butterflies & Buffalo website, watch the preview for the project on Vimeo, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or swing by the West Loop to see the camera for yourself.

Via Chicagoist

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Images on the Web Photography

Photography & The American Stage

Broadway Photographers is a website devoted to the visual culture of the American theater from 1865–1965. It features biographical content of photographers and performers, as well as thematic modules about theatrical photography. The website can be browsed by photographer, performer, or production, and also by keyword searching.

For more information, visit Broadway Photographs: Photography and the American Stage.

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Photography

Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915

Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society is a research database of more than 45,000 records culled from the exhibition catalogs of published by the Photographic Society in London from 1870 to 1915. The database contains detailed records of all exhibits, reproductions of the catalog pages, and information about “exhibitors, judges, hanging and selecting committee members, photographs, and companies.”

For more information or to explore the database, click here.