19th-Century Photographer Captured 5,000 Snowflakes 80
tcd004 writes "Wilson Bentley began photographing snowflakes in 1885, and managed to immortalize more than 5,000 crystals before his death in 1931. Now his images are widely recognized and highly sought after. At the age of 19, 'Snowflake' Bentley jury-rigged a microscope to a bulky bellows camera and took the first-ever photograph of a snowflake. Photography then, particularly microphotography, was much closer to science than art. In a 1910 article published in the journal Technical World, he wrote, 'Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure richly to reward the investigator." The video embedded at the link above touches on another long-forgotten piece of history: a sketch of the photographers who captured arial views of assemblages of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from WW-I, carefully choreographed and arranged to form a Liberty Bell, a Stature of Liberty, a US flag... as forgotten as the origin of the WW-I term razzle-dazzle.
Re:Bring forth ye Olde English Grammar Nazis (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Public Domain (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see why a still from the movie that consists of nothing except a verbatim copy of the original photograph wouldn't be in the public domain. If the movie itself has creative arrangement it may be copyrightable as a work, but that doesn't mean that any subsidiary parts of the movie that were drawn from the public domain magically get a new copyright as part of the new work.
For example, if I quote a public-domain poem in a new novel, the entire work (novel+poem) is copyrighted, but anyone may extract that poem from my novel and use it without my permission.
Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's said that no flake is equal to another, which is amazing de per se.
But I'm intrigued by the constant symmetry.
I can understand crystals and why they form natural patterns, like prisms or cubes, but given that everyone is different why an arm (or leg) is equal to the other? Maybe they form together (hence they grow identical) and then split somehow?
Any geologist or spelunker in the room?
Re:Shame they don't show the photographs. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://snowflakebentley.com/snowflakes.htm [snowflakebentley.com]