Toronto Lithographing Co Photography Dept 1898

 

Photography Department, 1898
Toronto Lithogaphing Co.

Toronto. We sometimes forget that our city once was the engine of industrial Canada. In 1898, the massive Toronto Lithographing Company, founded two decades earlier, commissioned  photographer A A Gray to record the interior facilities at the north-west corner of King and Bathurst.

Here you see the huge camera housed in the Photography Department. The photo is held as Fonds 1137, item 0002 by the Toronto Archives. The brief history and all 14 interior shots are noted by Toronto’s OCAD University downtown (the school of the colourful stilts you see on TV’s Kim’s Convenience program).

Thanks to PHSC member George Dunbar for sourcing a photo taken in this once famous business. Like most businesses of yesteryear, the Toronto Lithographing Company is now lost in History. Continue reading

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Ryerson’s Library and Archives collection

Kodak Roll film holder
Patent 22351 paper

Toronto. When you decide to do research on our rich photographic history, remember the resources we have in our university archives. A great example is the fabulous collection housed and inventoried by Ryerson.

Member George Dunbar sent an email recently to a number of us asking, “Is everyone aware of the excellent photography archive at Ryerson University? It’s here, at the University’s Archives and Special Collections site.”

Ryerson was the recipient of most of Kodak Canada’s records when it was seriously impacted by the digital wave that almost destroyed the still film industry from maker to consumer. The Kodak papers have been complimented by many other artifacts including donations by PHSC members Lorne Shields and Nick Graver. Well worth a look!

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Movies with a Fran 8K

Fran 8K Camcorder

Toronto. Ever hear of a Fran 8K camcorder? I didn’t either until an email hit my desk last Saturday morning. The resolution is huge (47.7 MP at 24 fps)  and the concept timely. The camera, available for order late this fall, uses Canon lenses and open source C++ apps to customize operation.

The programs and LUTs (Look Up Table) colour files are stored on a removable SD card. You do have a LUT controlling any screen – your computer has one – to set the correct colour balance etc.  A screen management tool for professionals can change the LUT file to correct for any colour drift so your photographic images remain accurate to your colour decisions. And so what you see is what you print.

The Fran 8K has a press release and website with the writing and images from Barcelona, Spain. The English used is not quite grammatically correct, but easily read and understood (unlike my very rough grasp of Spanish). Check out the website if you do any pro video work!

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Charlie and the Essanay movie studio in Chicago.

Charlie Chaplin post card Nr 1 – Essanay studio, Chicago, Illinois

Toronto. The year was 1915. A young actor called Charlie Chaplin spend a few months in the windy city. While there, he recorded a silent movie at the famous Chicago studio named Essanay for its two founders. Thanks to the Made in Chicago Museum, we learn of a part of Chaplin’s story often overlooked by his biographers.

You might ask, “How did I learn about this interesting bit of photographic trivia”? In a word: Dunbar. Yep, my good friend George Dunbar discovered this interesting story on the internet and sent me an email!

Food for thought: Chicago is about the same population as Toronto. We have museums like the famous ROM. Do we have enough things that were made here for a Made inToronto Museum?? Just asking …

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shooting movies in the 1920s

Roy Tash and Friend
Late 1920s – William James
City of Toronto Archives

Toronto. I visited my youngest grandson the other day. The eleven year old showed me his new iPad, bought with his own hard earned money. The past few weeks he has been busy creating animations. He has his own YouTube channel for his stop motion videos. The stop motion work began a few months before he bought his new iPad. He uses a cheap ($6.99CDN, $4.99USD) program called Rough Animator which has the necessary tools to create animated videos.  For a few years now he has created movies and movie trailers on his iPod Touch using iMovie.

Imagine how he would have done such work nearly a century ago using an expensive mechanical camera and reels of film! Those reels had to be developed and then edited to combine short bits into a cohesive movie. Hardly a job for an amateur let alone a child … The time delay between shooting and editing would turn off all but serious professionals.

In the 1920s, Roy Tash made his name creating such shorts with a heavy electrical-mechanical camera, reels of film, and a heavy old editing machine. This photograph taken by William James in the late 1920s is in the City of Toronto Archives as fonds 1244, item 8192. It shows Roy Tash proudly standing next to his massive tripod mounted movie camera.

Thanks to Goldie who emailed me about this image of Tash. He also posted it a few years ago (March 19, 2010) on the UrbanToronto website

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the eve of destruction

Apple QuickTake 100 by Kodak

Toronto. Ahh, the 1960s. I remember them well. One big hit in 1965 was the iconic song The Eve of Destruction sung by Barry McGuire. Sadly, unlike the song’s writer, the late P. F. Sloan, McGuire was a “one hit wonder”.

Little did we realize that three decades later we were truly on the eve of destruction with the digital wave finally reaching the awareness of the photographic consumer before growing to tsunami proportions wiping out traditional well established photographic industries in the coming decades.

Relatively inexpensive consumer digital photography began in 1994 as an inauspicious  movie-like camera called a QuickTake 100 sold by Apple. It took 8 minuscule 640×480 pixel images, suitable for the screen size of the most popular computers at the time. The lens was an 8mm fixed equivalent of a 50mm f/2 standard lens on a 35mm film camera. No preview screen. No image viewing other than by computer! But the images were all in 24bit colour.

A history of digital cameras is posted here on the Digital Camera Museum site. My thanks to our founder and fellow Apple enthusiast, John Linsky, for this Throwback Thursday link at DP Review. (John and I both use a 5120×2880 pixel computer screen today – about 38x the resolution of computer screens in 1994.)

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Camerama coming this fall

Sept 23, 2018
Camerama Show

Toronto. Did you hear the news? Gary Perry’s next show will be held on September 23rd 2018 at the Edward Hotel in North York (That’s Toronto for all you out of town folk). Click on the icon at left to read and print Gary’s poster with all the details.

I bumped into Gary at the July 15th PHSC Trunk Sale and purloined one of his flyers which I scanned and posted at left.

Not sure about going yet? Well then, hop over to Youtube and watch Mark Holtze’s video from the spring Camerama show which he uses for his talk on the video editing process.

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a hoot at the boot – our 8th trunk sale

some rare woodies
at the trunk sale

Toronto. Bob Lansdale gave me a call last week to see if I was going to the trunk sale Sunday. I agreed to go and Bob suggested if we arrived around 10am that would be great. I picked Bob up shortly after 9:30am and off we went.

Arriving at the Trident Hall just before 10:00, we split up to look around. Lots of goodies, lots of vendors and good parking by the time we arrived, mid-way between opening and closing times for the show. The rare woodies above left were part of a collection of some 600 pieces a chap had bought and was in the process of selling. He was afraid the cameras were fragile, so I shot through the case glass, reflections and all. One of the first vendors I spotted was my good friend Gary Perry of Camerama fame. Gary is a PHSC member and a regular at our fairs.

I met many of the executive out on the bright sunny day under the trees along the front of the hall. Clint was there by the entrance with some goodies and a careful eye to collect space fees for the society. Yvette brought along her little three-legged beagle and both enjoyed the excitement and browsing. I saw her departing with a trio of 20×24 inch darkroom trays. David Bridge and his wife Louise Freyburger came by, While Louise  spoke with Bob Lansdale (she is an assistant editor for the journal and runs the PHSC’s Facebook page) I chatted with David who had some chemical jugs in hand for his darkroom. Wayne Gilbert had the membership materials and lots of professional gear he was selling along with boxes of small bits like B&S heads, release cables, etc. Even Abraham Vinegar, up from Detroit, had a spot.

I met many other people including John Young’s son visiting from Williams Lake, BC. His late father owned a camera store here in Toronto on Yonge Street near Queen. John Kantymir dropped in from Port Colborne on the Lake Erie end of the Welland Canal and as usual had many rare items for sale including a huge Kodak Folder that seemed to make 5×7 contact prints; a beautiful art deco Kodak in black and silver stripes; an Ansco Memo camera which took 35mm film and was sold beginning in 1927 while its design date, clouded in time, may have preceded the 1924 introduction of the famous Leica; and a strange European camera that snapped its lens cap open just before it took a shot. The camera  was pristine thanks to the tatty case it was housed in.

Continue reading

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Tash meets LBP & Co in the 1960s.

Roy snaps the L B Pearson
Liberal Cabinet

Toronto. The well documented Canadian photographer Roy Tash visited Ottawa to record the illustrious, Nobel-prize winning Prime Minister Lester B Pearson and his cabinet. Pearson managed  to get our Canadian flag authorized in spite of the endless debates by the opposition PCs and their leader John G Diefenbaker. In addition to the flag, Pearson’s legacy lives on in the new name of the Toronto International Airport, the Toronto Pearson Airport, and in many social programs his minority government initiated to placate its NDP support.

Roy Tash (1898 – 1988) was born in Brooklyn NY and moved to Toronto about 1919 becoming a well known Canadian photographer last century.  After his death in December, 1988, we published an article in our journal vol 14-5 written by the late Bill Belier, our past president and editor who interviewed Mr Tash’s daughter.  Bill had known Roy personally  and arranged an interview with him in the fall of 1988 but Tash was too ill by then and died a few months later. Tash and his wife are buried nearby in Park Lawn  cemetery, Bloor and Park Lawn, Toronto.

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30th Daguerreian Society Symposium

Daguerreian Society

Toronto. Many of our members are also members of the Daguerreian Society. For many years Bob Lansdale was the official photographer of both societies. Dr Mike Robinson of Toronto is past president of the two societies. The next Daguerreian Society Symposium is planned for September 13 – 16, 2018 in NYC.

The keynote speaker is Grant Romer who spoke with us in February 2002 about Daguerreotypes. The speakers in no particular order include Edith Cuerrier, a past PHSC member and author of an article on George Eastman in our December 2002 journal Photographic Canadiana. The other speakers named so far are Denise Bethel, Sean Corcoran, and Jan Herman.

Details of the 2017 conference are shown here. Go to the NY Photography Fair page to register or get further details. A special thanks to Bob Lansdale for alerting me to the Symposium.

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