The ruins of Detroit

Ruined United Artists Theatre in Detroit

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre photographed the the abandoned and decrepit structures of Detroit.

Having photographed old buildings – “mainly disused theatres” – in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. “It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,” says Meffre, “but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.”

Be sure to visit the gallery as well.


The first digital camera

The first digital camera

Steve Sasson created the world’s first digital camera in 1976, while working at Kodak. He discusses the development of the camera in this video.

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device.

Given Moore’s Law, they estimated that it would take 15 to 20 years before such a camera reached the general consumer. The patent file contains a description and drawings of the apparatus.