Cameras abandoned 85 years ago by photography pioneer found on glacier | Hacker News Reader

Cameras abandoned 85 years ago by photography pioneer found on glacier

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A few striking examples of Brad Washburn’s photographs:

https://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artists/47-bradford-was...

those are some fine pictures that any current pro would be glad to be author of

Nah you need at least 40mpx to be a pro /s

Medium format film is well above being 40mpx equivalent.

The /s indicates sarcasm, I myself shoot 35mm and 120 film

Yes I know. It chances nothing for my comment.

My daughter decided to take photography in college. She came home crying everyday when she realized just how hard professional level work is.

Amazing pictures. Looks like an alien planet. Several of them had me do a double take on the scale. I have seldom seen a more useful "human for scale".

I judged off the scale 10 to 100 times before I saw the humans in the picture. There seem's to be something fractal about the appearance of rock and snow, or maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the subject matter.

So is there undeveloped photos in the cameras, or is the film blank/unrecoverable?

I'm guessing you'll need to watch the upcoming documentary to find out. Or wait for an article post documentary.

Considering the state of the cameras I wouldn't be surprised if the film was at least partially exposed to light when they removed it from the ice.

Even if the film was unexposed there is still corrosion and water damage.

I don't know the answer, but there's a famous lost camera owned by a team that perished on Everest before Hillary/Norgay successfully climbed it. It's possible that the camera contains proof of an earlier first ascent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory#Reaching_the_su...

Kodak has published instructions for how to protect the camera and develop the film, if it's ever found: https://web.archive.org/web/20130303001517/http://www.veloci...

It's an ad for some company that tracks glacier movement, but honestly it's not too bad. If the prerequisite for sponsored content is that you have to prove yourself by mounting an expedition, I'm OK with that.

If you can find cameras in an area where entire large aircraft have been lost without a trace, you deserve your ad.

What impressed me most about this story is that Teton Gravity Research isn't actually a research company, they're a action sports film production house with a funny name. They make (very good) movies of snowboarders, skiers, and mountain bikers.

https://tgrtv.tetongravity.com/

You're not entirely wrong, the article is pretty much an ad, but it's for the upcoming film about the search and the recovery.

Visually, "The Sanctity of Space" [0], starring huge amounts of Washburns archival footage, was absolutely stunning. As a movie, I found it to be a bit too long winded

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9806166/

> “From a cultural resource management perspective, it presents a rare and valuable opportunity to study change over time on an archaeological site in a dynamic glacial environment.”

It's cool that there are people who care so much to look into what can be learned from the minutiae of these kinds of one-off events. I suppose this case ladders up into archaeology as an entire field, but this kind of niche interest-within-an-interest exists all over the place. I find it really inspiring, it makes me proud of humanity!

Griffen Post is a hell of a skier too. Cool find.

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