History of Flash and Ilford Flashguns

I love huge, detailed, well sourced, documents like this. They are often on obscure or not "mainstream" topics. I often think that these kinds of writers are essentially the important historians of our age. As long as this document survives, a hundred years later someone can read it and understand the details of the history of flash photography. People rarely think about just how important someone's obsession over a "weird" or "pointless" topic can be for the historians of the next century.

I love the way individual web pages and blogs allow anyone to become a thorough historian like this. This is the kind of thing that put stars in the eyes of the dreamers in the infancy of the internet. Though you could argue that anyone could print a small amount of their own work ever since the printing press, the bar has significantly been lowered.

This may be covered in the article, but flash bulbs are still used where you want a lot of light but don’t want to bring in a lot of equipment (battery packs, etc). For example, they’re still used in cave photography. You set the camera down on a tripod, open the shutter, and fire off a few flash bulbs in the cave.

I have many fond memories of discovering that in a pallet of equipment that I had bought for $10 at auction was a couple of cases of flash bulbs (it came from SRI where they had used these in some sort of high speed photography setup).