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Why didn't people smile in old photographs? It wasn't just about the long exposure times.

People blame these serious expressions on how long they had to sit for a photo, but that's not the whole picture.

Public domain images

Photos from the 1800s were so serious.

If you've ever perused photographs from the 19th and early 20th century, you've likely noticed how serious everyone looked. If there's a hint of a smile at all, it's oh-so-slight, but more often than not, our ancestors looked like they were sitting for a sepia-toned mug shot or being held for ransom or something. Why didn't people smile in photographs? Was life just so hard back then that nobody smiled? Were dour, sour expressions just the norm?

Most often, people's serious faces in old photographs are blamed on the long exposure time of early cameras, and that's true. Taking a photo was not an instant event like it is now; people had to sit still for many minutes in the 1800s to have their photo taken.

Ever try holding a smile for only one full minute? It's surprisingly difficult and very quickly becomes unnatural. A smile is a quick reaction, not a constant state of expression. Even people we think of as "smiley" aren't toting around full-toothed smiles for minutes on end. When you had to be still for several minutes to get your photo taken, there was just no way you were going to hold a smile for that long.

But there are other reasons besides long exposure times that people didn't smile in early photographs.

1800s photographsWhy so serious? Public domain

The non-smiling precedent had already been set by centuries of painted portraits

The long exposure times for early photos may have contributed to serious facial expressions, but so did the painted portraits that came before them. Look at all of the portraits of famous people throughout history prior to cameras. Sitting to be painted took hours, so smiling was out of the question. Other than the smallest of lip curls like the Mona Lisa, people didn't smile for painted portraits, so why would people suddenly think it normal to flash their pearly whites (which were not at all pearly white back then) for a photographed one? It simply wasn't how it was done.

A smirk? Sometimes. A full-on smile? Practically never.

"Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci, painted in 1503Public domain

Smiling usually indicated that you were a fool or a drunkard

Our perceptions of smiling have changed dramatically since the 1800s. In explaining why smiling was considered taboo in portraits and early photos, art historian Nicholas Jeeves wrote in Public Domain Review:

"Smiling also has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment […] Showing the teeth was for the upper classes a more-or-less formal breach of etiquette."

"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hals, sometime between 1640 and 1646Public domain

In other words, to the Western sensibility, smiling was seen as undignified. If a painter did put a smile on the subject of a portrait, it was a notable departure from the norm, a deliberate stylistic choice that conveyed something about the artist or the subject.

Even the artists who attempted it had less-than-ideal results. It turns out that smiling is such a lively, fleeting expression that the artistically static nature of painted portraits didn't lend itself well to showcasing it. Paintings that did have subjects smiling made them look weird or disturbing or drunk. Simply put, painting a genuine, natural smile didn't work well in portraits of old.

As a result, the perception that smiling was an indication of lewdness or impropriety stuck for quite a while, even after Kodak created snapshot cameras that didn't have the long exposure time problem. Even happy occasions had people nary a hint of joy in the photographs that documented them.

wedding party photoEven wedding party photos didn't appear to be joyful occasions.Wikimedia Commons

Then along came movies, which may have changed the whole picture

So how did we end up coming around to grinning ear to ear for photos? Interestingly enough, it may have been the advent of motion pictures that pushed us towards smiling being the norm.

Photos could have captured people's natural smiles earlier—we had the technology for taking instant photos—but culturally, smiling wasn't widely favored for photos until the 1920s. One theory about that timing is that the explosion of movies enabled us to see emotions of all kinds playing out on screen, documenting the fleeting expressions that portraits had failed to capture. Culturally, it became normalized to capture, display and see all kind of emotions on people's faces. As we got more used to that, photo portraits began portraying people in a range of expression rather than trying to create a neutral image of a person's face.

Changing our own perceptions of old photo portraits to view them as neutral rather than grumpy or serious can help us remember that people back then were not a bunch of sourpusses, but people who experienced as wide a range of emotion as we do, including joy and mirth. Unfortunately, we just rarely get to see them in that state before the 1920s.

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Science

MIT’s trillion-frames-per-second camera can capture light as it travels

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera."

Photo from YouTube video.

Photographing the path of light.

A new camera developed at MIT can photograph a trillion frames per second.

Compare that with a traditional movie camera which takes a mere 24. This new advancement in photographic technology has given scientists the ability to photograph the movement of the fastest thing in the Universe, light.

The actual event occurred in a nano second, but the camera has the ability to slow it down to twenty seconds.

time, science, frames per second, bounced light

The amazing camera.

Photo from YouTube video.

 For some perspective, according to New York Times writer, John Markoff, "If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years."


In the video below, you'll see experimental footage of light photons traveling 600-million-miles-per-hour through water.

It's impossible to directly record light so the camera takes millions of scans to recreate each image. The process has been called femto-photography and according to Andrea Velten, a researcher involved with the project, "There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera."

(H/T Curiosity)


This article originally appeared on 09.08.17

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Art

Photographer captures water droplets—'liquid sculptures'—that look like they're alive

Absolutely breathtaking.

Ronny Tertnes/Facebook

Ronny Tertnes' "liquid sculptures" are otherworldly.

Human beings have sculpted artwork out of all kinds of materials throughout history, from clay to concrete to bronze. Some sculpt with water in the form of ice, but what if you could create sculptures with small drops of liquid?

Norwegian artist Ronny Tertnes does just that. His "liquid sculptures" look like something from another planet or another dimension, while at the same time are entirely recognizable as water droplets.

I mean, check this out:


According to SLR Lounge, Tertnes uses ultra high-speed photography, flash rigs, smoke and different types of liquids to create and capture his colorful split-second sculptures. He mixes water with various substances to create texture, color and movement in his photos, and the effect is otherworldly. He does some editing in Photoshop as well. The form in his photographs comes from the unique movement of a single droplet, which can end up looking like a human, a flower, an alien or an abstract glass sculpture. Sometimes they look like people dancing. Just incredible.

Tertnes has shared many of his photos on Facebook and on his website, where you can purchase prints, calendars and more featuring these beauties:

It's fun to ask what other people see when they look at these images.

Amazingly enough, Tertnes has described himself as a "hobby photographer."

Sometimes he creates mirror images that end up looking like animals or alien creatures.

If you're into (or have a marginal understanding of and interest in) NFTs, Tertnes has a Liquid Sculptures NFT store as well.

And finally, here's a slideshow where you can hear him play the guitar and look at his beautiful liquid sculptures. Enjoy.

This article originally appeared on 1.14.22

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Culture

This essential photography lesson shows how selfies distort what we really look like

Don't be fooled!

Evey Winters/Facebook, Vox/YouTube

What you look like in a selfie camera isn't really what you look like in real life.

We've all done it: You snap a selfie, look at it, say, "OMG is my nose swollen?" then try again from a different angle. "Wait, now my forehead looks weird. And what's up with my chin?" You keep trying various angles and distances, trying to get a picture that looks like how you remember yourself looking. Whether you finally land on one or not, you walk away from the experience wondering which photo actually looks like the "real" you.

I do this, even as a 40-something-year-old who is quite comfortable with the face I see in the mirror. So, it makes me cringe imagining a tween or teen, who likely take a lot more selfies than I do, questioning their facial features based on those snapshots. When I'm wondering why my facial features look weird in selfies it's because I know my face well enough to know that's not what it looks like. However, when a young person whose face is changing rapidly sees their facial features distorted in a photo, they may come to all kinds of wrong conclusions about what they actually look like.

Not that it should matter, of course. But we're talking about people living in a society obsessed with personal appearance. It's going to matter to a lot of people, and if they get the wrong impression of their face, some people will go to all sorts of lengths to change it. That's why understanding a bit about how focal lengths on cameras can impact what we see in photographs is vital.

Writer Evey Winters shared some of that education in a post on Facebook. She writes about this topic through a trans and dysmorphia lens, but it applies to everyone.

Winters points out that if someone is thinking of doing surgery to change their bodies, they should seek sources outside of themselves and a cellphone camera.

"I have dysmorphia and recognize that in myself," she wrote, "but even if I didn’t, there’s not a selfie I’ve ever taken that would accurately help me make choices about my face. Mirrors are slightly better only for their minimal distortions."

"If you want the best chance at getting good feedback pre-op about what you might want to change," she added, "I’d recommend a skilled photographer take a series of photos of you at different focal lengths and even then none of these will be entirely accurate as none of these employ humans binocular vision and filtering."

Winters shared a collage of photos of the same girl's face at different focal lengths to show the significant difference it makes. "Notice how in different photos this child’s eyes may appear to be slightly hooded," she wrote. "The nose appears enlarged disproportionately. Hairline seems to shift with every snap. So does jaw shape, face shape, and even the width and size of the ears."

The difference between each of these photos is significant, but the difference between the first and the last is stunning. Cellphone selfie cameras usually have an even smaller focal length than the 40 mm shown here (Winters points out that the iPhone 13 Pro Max selfie camera has the equivalent of a 23 mm focal length), so they distort facial features even more. It also depends on how far away from the camera you are—the closer you are, the more distortion you'll see. Lighting matters, too, but even the best lighting can't cancel out what the focal length is doing.

Vox shared a video specifically about the "big nose" phenomenon with selfies, showing how drastic the distortion can be.

As a parent of two teens and a young adult, I find these photos to be fantastic tools for teaching my kids not to put too much stock in what they see in a selfie. Far too many people are increasingly seeking out plastic surgery to change a nose or a forehead or a jawline that doesn't even really exist. Imagine looking in a funhouse mirror and thinking you need to do something to change how you look. Selfie cameras are basically mini funhouse mirrors. Smartphones and apps are getting better at making filters that adjust for those distortions, but none of us should be relying on selfies of any kind to see what we really look like, much less taking major measures to alter our appearance based on what we see in them.

Even if you have some physical feature you simply can't accept and want to change, make sure you get a skilled photographer to give you the most accurate picture of what it actually looks like. As Winters concluded at the end of her post: "Make sure you’re not reshaping your body for a you that only exists in selfie cams."

Thank you for the reminder, Ms. Winters.


This article originally appeared on 1.18.22

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