I've written about glass, as in lenses, for years now. But I've never looked into the history of glass as just a substance, because, well, who cared? When I accidentally did some reading about early glass, though, I was rather amazed at just how important it was. So I thought I'd write about the history [...]

We get to do some fun things through our testing company, Olaf Optical Testing. A lot of it I can't talk about but sometimes we get a project that we can share. One of these came up recently when Matt Leeg asked us if we were interested in testing and cleaning an Angenieux 25mm f/0.95 [...]

"He caused a lot of trouble over here, you know."  A librarian at the Royal Aeronautical Society, when asked for references on Sydney Cotton. It's been a while since I did a history article. I love writing about the true "characters" of photography, and to be honest, I hadn't stumbled across anyone that really interested [...]

I doubt any of you remember it, but 1995 was the coming out party for Digital SLRs. There had been digital cameras before then. There had even been digital SLR cameras of a sort - modified cameras tethered to a hard drive -- before then. But in 1995 camera makers released digital SLR cameras for [...]

Nadar Rotating Portrait. Circa 1865, Bibliothèque Nationale de France   "He is a man of wit without a shadow of rationality . . . His life has been, still is, and always will be incoherent."  Charles Philipon, describing Felix Tournachon. Photographers are the most fascinating people. I'm sure there are some that simply spent their life [...]