Norwegian Student Takes Secret Street Photos In The 1890s

The Narrative Clip is similar - the Clip 2 sells for about $200, which isn't too far off from the adjusted price. It's not branded as a spy camera, but looks pretty discreet.

Depends on the quality you want, I guess.

A 640x480 VGA camera for Arduino, where the lens is about 1cm, so it'd fit pretty well, is about $5. Throw in a Nano for the board for another $5, and an SD card module for another $5, and you can probably build your own for about $20 all up.

Prebuilt, I've seen a few wireless "drone" cameras of similar quality for $20, and a few Chinese shops carry cameras like this [0] for $25 or so.

But... If you want better than a crappy VGA, you'll be looking for a while.

[0] http://www.dx.com/p/super-mini-small-portable-camera-button-...

Are you American? Streets in plenty of European cities still look like that.

Oslo is a very clean city, but it also feels a lot busier now than it looks in these pictures.

A lot of the photos were taken around the parliament buildings, the royal palace, and the national theatre, which may explain why the streets are so clean and the standard of attire is so high.

He’s mostly walking up and down the Main Street of central Oslo, you can try it your self - use Google Street View on “Karl Johans Gate”.

Notable buildings in the shots are Stortinget (Parlament), the University of Oslo and in one of the shots, the Royal Castle

Our streets look similar to this, I rarely see any litter unless after a really big event or similar.

Background: I'm not in Oslo but I'm living in Gothenburg which is both close by (roughly 3 hours with bus) and roughly the same size. I live on the main Avenue (avenyn) walk to and from work so I see much of the central inner city every day.

Looking at the pictures it seems that they were taken exactly in the moment of greeting the photographer (People with their hands on hats...). The way the function of the camera is described, using the gestures of greeting someone may have nicely helped in keeping his camera a secret.

Also: Indeed, very nice to see people smiling in that time! I wonder how much the grim-looking portraits we know add to the cliche of hard-ship and sadness we have of earlier times.

Then, having to look that way when being portrayed may stemmed from who were the earliest people being portrayed: Saints, Kings and Queens.

> it's strange to imagine that happening in a city today

Sometimes I fantasize about just greeting everybody I come across to add some friendliness to the world, until I realize that most people, in an urban setting, would probably be utterly bewildered and confused by such a behavior.

It's sad how urban living seems to have conditioned us to treat every other human as a total stranger from whom we should keep the furthest possible distance, physically and emotionally.

It's not just the lack of smiling. It's that they were stiff as a board, staring expressionlessly out into space, looking lifeless, taxidermic.

The candidness of these photos is interesting because the people look so natural. It's not just the smiling, it's the casual, natural looking poses and expressions, only about half of which are actually smiling. They look actual real life people so to speak.

Photos of this quality weren't sharp enough to make out any detail on any of these people's teeth.

I wonder if they assumed that they should try to look as they would for a painted portrait.

Wait, this is wildly off topic, but can we talk about the snow woman in the sixth picture? What is happening there? Is that a person covered in snow? A really shockingly well crafted sculpture done by two women with shovels? I am so baffled.

The theory that I’ve heard is that reliable heating lead to the general decline in hat wearing. Not sure what to think.

If you look at pictures taken in public places as late as the 1950s then almost everyone is wearing a hat.

It is in public. And if you sneakily take a photo of someone, how would they know to react? On top of that, there are cameras everywhere in public taking covert photos of everyone, I haven't seen anyone react to it.

Same here. Must have a good leather sole as well. Finding that is hard. But I had a pair of shoes from a Spanish (Spain) brand whos name escapes me - but best shoes I have ever had. I had them re-soled twice as I loved them so much.

Also, watching vids of bespoke shoemaking is satisfying

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs3EJmuzAoA

Edit: I recall the shoe company:

Mezlan.com - they don’t make the shoe I had any longer, but the quality of their shoes is top notch for the price.

I'm the exact opposite. I often work at a standing desk and I can last a lot longer standing in sneakers than leather shoes.

The big reason though is that I'd much rather have 4 pairs of $100 sneakers than one pair of $400 leather shoes. I get bored of wearing the same shoes and being able to frequently swap them out for new ones is part of the appeal.

I'll take a nice pair of well-worn cowboy boots over the "comfort" of a sneaker any day.

Those clothes are mostly home made. It's not so hard once you know how to do it.

They almost certainly only had one or two outfits for going out. The ones strolling around might also be richer on average as the poorer would need to be working (either at a job or in the home).

EDIT: I suppose the photographer might have preferred better dressed subjects, too.

I wonder about that myself. Those are some elaborate outfits. Manufacturing the full outfit with first world labour by hand using natural fibres would cost 1000s of dollars in today's market.

One guy had a beaver pelt top hat. I read somewhere that at one time they cost as much as a Porsche in today's dollars, though you can only make a crude analogy between our money and theirs.

We dress worse now than we did than because clothing is cheap and mass produced. If you look at a typical middle class family from 1880, much more of their paycheck would go towards clothing, and they would have far fewer options in what to wear.

My grandfather was a tailor, and ended up employing a 100 people or so. Tailor made clothing was the norm, rather than the exception for anybody of moderate means and just about everybody that could afford it had a sewing machine or knew how to use one. Sewing machines were common wedding gifts, and were the equivalent in money of a small car today. Fabrics were of far better quality than the ones we have today and repairing stuff rather than throwing it away was normal. Fashion was as much a thing back then as it is now.

Both the photographer and his subjects are the elite. No-one in a top hat would tip it to anyone of a lower status.

Nowadays, things that can be made by machine using little labour are cheap. Things that need a lot of manual labour are super expensive.

We are wealthy because so many cheap things exist now, so we can have a lot of things. But tailored clothes are still expensive.

Or who could afford a $15 camera like that. ($400 in today's money based on another comment)

just do it; one cool thing about NYC is seeing well-dressed men in every day life

I've worn a suit almost every day for the past 3 years, no one really mentions it. Looks perfectly casual depending on the tie and jacket you pick. Natural materials for ties somehow look less formal I've found.

In those days I doubt they would know what it is even if they notice something

I suspected the same, but maybe he was actually explaining it in some of the photos.

It looks to arouse the same response you might get from Google Glass.

When approached by a young man with a camera lens sticking out of his jacket, younger subjects seem to be amused; some of the older subjects are not.