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Photographs
below are taken from A Hundred Photographs that Changed the World by
LIFE on the website of the Digital Journalist:
http://digitaljournalist.org/contents.html |
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Have you ever heard someone say, "A picture is worth a
thousand words"?
Study the famous photographs on this page and learn how
they gave a powerful message to the viewer.
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U-Tube video of Masters of Photography |
View this U-Tube Video of great photographers |
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What Makes a Great Photograph |
View this Google Video of what makes a great photograph. |
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The First Human X-ray
To know something like the back of your hand is a timeless concept, one
taken yet further by Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen. While working on a series of
experiments with a Crookes tube, he noticed that a bit of barium
platinocyanide emitted a fluorescent glow. He then laid a photographic plate
behind his wife’s hand (note the wedding rings), and made the first X-ray
photo. Before that, physicians were unable to look inside a person’s body
without making an incision. Roentgen was the recipient of the first Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1901. |
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Earthrise 1968
The late adventure photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential
environmental photograph ever taken.” Captured on Christmas Eve, 1968, near
the end of one of the most tumultuous years the U.S. had ever known, the
Earthrise photograph inspired contemplation of our fragile existence and our
place in the cosmos. For years, Frank Borman and Bill Anders of the Apollo 8
mission each thought that he was the one who took the picture. An
investigation of two rolls of film seemed to prove Borman had taken an
earlier, black-and-white frame, and the iconic color photograph, which later
graced a U.S. postage stamp and several book covers, was by Anders.
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Promontory Point 1869
The ceremony begins on May 10, 1869, as an eastbound Central Pacific
locomotive and a westbound Union Pacific locomotive meet in Promontory
Point, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental
railroad. The men on the cowcatchers are ready to toast the driving of
the golden spike. The work had been brutal. At one stage, efforts to
tunnel through the marble spine of a Sierra Nevada mountain consumed
an entire year, as only eight inches a day of progress was possible.
So: a fabulous accomplishment. But this is also an early example of a
photo op—the use of a picture as a means to an end. Folks back East
could see, plain as day, that a train could take them all the way to
California, where businessmen anxiously awaited their commerce.
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Galloping Horse 1878
Was there a moment midstride when horses had all hooves off the ground?
Leland Stanford, the railroad baron and future university founder, bet
there was—or at least that’s the story. It was 1872 when Stanford hired
noted landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge to figure it out. It took
years, but Muybridge delivered: He rigged a racetrack with a dozen strings
that triggered 12 cameras. Muybridge not only proved Stanford right but
also set off the revolution in motion photography that would become
movies. Biographer Rebecca Solnit summed up his life: “He is the man who
split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting
of the atom.”
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| Terms to know:
focus
background
camera angle
centering subject
lens
shutter speed
aperture
exposure
caption |
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