Page 115 - Expanded Photography
P. 115
Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 115/146
Siegmund Lubin: Rooftop motion-picture studio New York 1899.
Lubin is of course the first real entrepreneur of the Cinema - he built his own projector the Cineo- graph/Marvel, based upon Charles Pathé’s Studio Camera - Lubin improved this by adding a ta- chometer, so that cameramen would know exactly what speed to hand-crank their films. He was among the first to set up his own film studio - making over 1000 films (often copies of Melies, or Edison’s films - he was the first film-pirate too), opened film studios across the States, created marketing plans for films (etc).What this image reveals is that before widespread electric lighting (really from the 1930s), there was nothing to beat the naked sun as a light source for the best cap- ture of images on film. The camera is in the foreground, with the mustachio’d cinematographer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubin_Manufacturing_Company
The ways you could sculpt, modulate, or filter natural sunlight were several, from overhead hoods or roller blinds of opaque or semi-translucency (like Theatrical Gauze or scrim), to smoke, use of mirrors, frosted or coloured glass, natural fronds, palm-leaves etc. Photo-pioneers developed some ingenious arrangements of mirrors to module and direct sunlight, for example the 5-way mirror for multiple portraits:
