Lomography wants to bring back the Petzval lens, a pioneering piece of hardware for
commercial photography. Consider the darlings of the
market. Between the Lytro
and its newer app, and the forthcoming Instagram
(or just Instagram itself), we really put a lot of effort into making digital photographs look soft and analog. It’s easy to forget
that those charming inaccuracies used to happen naturally, simply because of the early mechanics of photography. Analog photography, in its original form, began in 1839 when the Giroux Daguerrotype was introduced. The first
commercial was a wooden box housed within a larger sliding wooden box
that the photographer would adjust for focus. But these models had such limited aperture
that it took 10 minutes of sunlight to get a properly exposed photograph. That might work for a still life or a landscape, but it compromised portrait photography, since virtually no one can sit perfectly still for
that length of time.Read Full Story