Amazing Snapshots of Animals
Bring Fame to Desert Photographer
IN A desert shack that cost less than fifty cents to build, Fred V. Sampson, of Barstow, Calif., has found not only contentment but a curious road to fame. Three years ago, he left his job as a commercial artist in Los Angeles and built the low, one-room hut on the edge of the Mohave Desert. Three wails are made of mud and stones, the fourth is formed of the gold-bearing rock of a steep hillside. Here, Sampson spends his days doing what he wants most to do, making friends with curious creatures of the desert and snapping pictures of the animals in action. These photographs—some of the most remarkable wildlife pictures ever made—are attracting wide attention.
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This is a pretty crazy way to store data.
Camera Snaps Answers
To speed recording answers in computing machines, Kodak has made a new camera that snaps 1,000 12-digit numbers a second. The numbers are photographed from a cathode-ray tube as spots; retranslated into electrical impulses by photoelectric tubes as desired for feeding back into the computer. Mosaic above is film section enlarged 25 times. A 100-foot strip holds 3,000,000 digits.
Nothing interesting, I just thought the picture was great.
Wallpaper For Picture Backgrounds
WALLPAPER is inexpensive, colorful, and picturesque—in short, it is ideal as a background for portraits, still life and table-top set-ups. It is best used when mounted on rolls. Use cardboard tubing of fairly large diameter, not less than 2 in. across. Short tubes can be lengthened by splicing two sections together over a length of narrower tubing.
Before cutting the roll of wallpaper into lengths, make sure that the patterns will match. To do this, first cut a strip to the desired length and lay it out on the floor or table. Then unroll the next strip alongside the first and shift it up or down until the pattern matches.
He Takes Arial Photos from His Back Yard
THE old stunt of using a kite to fly a camera aloft has been developed to a fine art by Frank S. Crowell, of St. Albans, N. Y. His homemade aluminum cameras, fitted with fuse-operated shutters, have flown to a height of 2,000′, and Crowell explains that only the hazard of collision with planes has kept him from going higher on days when conditions were favorable for flying kites.
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The Camera Queen
Margaret Bourke-White, who saw beauty in the lines of a steel girder and the blackness of a coal mine, pioneers a new era of photography.
by Richard H. Parke
WHEN I called on Margaret Bourke-White in her spacious penthouse studio in a Fifth Avenue office building, she had just returned to New York from photographing a new textile mill in the South. Piled high in the center of the vast room was the equipment she had carried with her: A couple of cameras, a box of flashlight bulbs, a folded tripod and three or four travel-scarred suitcases.
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This is actually a really good idea.
Punch and Judy Theater Hides Camera from Children
Getting young children to pose naturally indoors for a portrait is far from easy, as many amateur photographers have discovered. If much work of this type is to be done, it pays to follow the example of successful professionals and give the children something interesting to look at. In one studio devoted to child photography, the camera is set up behind a Punch and Judy theater. The children are fascinated by the puppets and pay little or no attention to anything else, so that it is a simple matter to take their pictures.
—Lawrence Gottlieb.
Long before the distort and spherize filters in Photoshop, photographers used the advanced tea-spoon filter.
Photographic Monstrosities
by Paul Hadley
FREAKISH photographs, in which the image of a person’s head or body appears hideously distorted, are frequently seen in picture exhibitions and in advertising. These always attract the eye, but the amateur picture-maker generally considers the making of these photographic “monstrosities” as beyond his ability.
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Wait a minute. You mean that’s a photograph? Not a window? Wow, they sure had me fooled.
Realistic Story of Steel Told in Photo-Murals
Interesting scenes in the steel industry, from the mine to finished bridges and buildings, decorate the walls of one room in a Chicago club. The story is told in photo-murals. In a curved alcove at one side, the wall is completely covered with one large mural showing a night scene at a steel mill. So realistic is it that the observer feels he actually is looking through a single pane window at the mill. Special illumination is housed in ceiling fixtures of steel frames.
This stuff was a bit harder before photoshop.
HOW TO MAKE INCREDIBLE PICTURES
LAUGH-PROVOKING trick pictures are fun to make and more fun to show. Contrary to popular belief, such pictures can be produced by the amateur photographer, even though he has only limited equipment. Trick shots involve two steps: cutouts and pasteups. The equipment required for them, in addition to a camera and enlarger, is a sharp knife, a sheet of clear glass large enough to hold an 8 x 10 glossy print, and a piece of heavy cardboard of the same size.
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