Texas State Fair long past

October 24, 2010

Texas State Fair 1912 - LOC panoramic photo - 6a28033r

Texas State Fair, 1908 - Library of Congress panoramic photo

Click on the photo to see a much larger version.

From the astonishingly vast vaults of the Library of Congress, a panoramic photograph of the main entrance of the Texas State Fair, in 1908.  This is almost certainly Dallas, and this is probably the same entrance where today the short-rail mass transit trains pass by — a century later, and Dallas has once again got mass transit.

This photo contrasts starkly with Fair Park in Dallas today, a week after the closing of the 2010 Texas State Fair.

Details from the Library of Congress:

Item Title

Texas State Fair, Main Entrance.
Created/Published  c1908.

Copyright deposit; H. Clogenson; December 8, 1908; DLC/PP-1908:43634.
Copyright claimant’s address: Dallas, Texas
Medium:  1 photographic print : gelatin silver ; 9.5 x 43 in.

Call Number:  PAN SUBJECT – Events no. 31
REPRODUCTION NUMBER:  LC-USZ62-125457 DLC (b&w film copy neg.)

Who was H. Clogenson?  What other treasures did he leave around?

Leave a Comment » | photography, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

David Bergman’s gigapan photo of the inauguration

February 3, 2009

Can’t embed the photo here.  Panoramic photos are cool things to use to capture history.  Photographer David Bergman made a colossal, 1,464 megapixel photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama — you gotta see it.

Bergman described it:

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama’s inaugural address. To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position. The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Bergman is offering prints for sale.

Were you at the inauguration, on the Capitol grounds?  Check Bergman’s photo, and zoom in to see whether you can see yourself in history.

A smaller version of Bergmans GigaPan photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama

A smaller version of Bergman’s GigaPan photo of the inauguration of Barack Obama; go see the zoomable version at Bergman’s site, and marvel at the detail of faces

Tip of the old scrub brush to julie@century.

3 Comments | Barack Obama, History, History images, Images, President Obama, Presidents, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell