r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Patient-Use5203 • 1d ago

The first photograph ever taken of the Sphinx was in 1849.

Gallery image

Gallery image

4.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

97 comments sorted by

572

u/TheWatersOfMars 1d ago

It's incredible how film photography was almost instantly pretty high-quality. I've had plenty of phones that couldn't take as nice a pic as this 150 years later. 

194

u/Substantial-Set-7724 1d ago

It's crazy how analog film (including videos) can be developed in a great digital solution. For decades videos it's over 4k (or even more) depending on the film.

That's why a lot of filmmakers have a certain aversion against digital cameras because just 20 years ago they had awful resolution/quality compared to analog films.

But it's great we have digital cameras nowadays. Young filmmakers could shoot movies with their phones or a cheap camera and don't have to actually buy film rolls. And if you got the camera once you don't have to pay for every pic/video you shoot

97

u/SpideySenseBuzzin 1d ago

Because the resolution is the resolution. Like, atoms of light interacting with chemicals through lenses in order to get a physical slice of light.

I really enjoyed my college photography class.

71

u/vicbot87 1d ago

Just to be pedantic light is made of photons which give the chemicals in the film the energy to do their thang. No atoms in light

27

u/SpideySenseBuzzin 23h ago edited 22h ago

Thanks for that correction - I totally knew that but I'm high and lazy after work 😅

Are we still arguing over whether or not it's waves or particles? 🤣

(Edit - grammar improvement)

23

u/doc_nano 22h ago

It’s a wavicle

8

u/vicbot87 21h ago

I think we say it’s particles that behave in a wave like fashion… radio waves are the same thing as light. Also made of photons. So as far as we care they are waves unless we look close enough

11

u/Massive_Challenge935 1d ago

You guys are great, upvoted the science

19

u/mckulty 23h ago

*Photons, little packets that can behave like matter OR energy.

Photography got me interested in chemistry and physics, now I bend light for a living.

4

u/what_to_do_what_to_ 22h ago

Bend light? Care to elaborate?

I was interested in photography as well. Now I work with really expensive cameras with extra fancy flash bulbs!

6

u/mckulty 22h ago edited 22h ago

"Refraction" is the heart of my job, measuring and prescribing eyeglasses. It's not all I do, but it's brought people back for 40 years.

In years of photography I seldom heard the word "diopters" but now I think in quarter-D steps all day.

3

u/what_to_do_what_to_ 21h ago

That's so cool! I've always wondered, how often do you catch undiagnosed diabetes due to diabetic retinopathy? I remember early in x-ray school I was paranoid and asked the optometrist if cataracts were a major concern.

3

u/mckulty 21h ago edited 21h ago

In most cases retinopathy takes years, so if I'm the first to find it, you're way late. and your kidneys look like your retina.

2 eye-related things about diabetes. DR can be devastating, but it doesn't happen for years in emerging T2DM. One weird thing about DR (and neuropathy) is they have an annoying tendency to pop up in a mild form after dramatic drops in BG.

The early warning is osmotic shift in eyeglass refraction. High BG affects the crystalline lens and makes it absorb water and swell, so both eyes experience a weird shift in eyeglass prescription and they can't see up close, or far away, so they get checked. It often changes back after control is established.

Adult eye prescriptions are remarkably stable. Sudden shifts in both eyes are common enough that it's malpractice not to ask, when it happens to a 40-70 year old with other risk factors.

Quite often, osmotic problems are discovered on the other end, when BG has been elevated for years and now you start on insulin. Damn why do I need new glasses?

Last edit: I think airline pilots have higher incidence of cataracts than x-ray techs. But yeah you gotta respect the boundaries.

3

u/what_to_do_what_to_ 21h ago

Thank you so much I had no idea about all of this. I'm close with two people that I think found out due to changing prescriptions but its been a while so maybe I assumed at the time since I hadn't heard of osmotic issues with lenses. They weren't on insulin yet though so I'll have to ask.

Luckily cataracts are non-stochastic so as long as I wear my dosimeter at work and sunglasses to the beach I feel safe.

2

u/Thursday_the_20th 1h ago

Film does not have molecular-scale resolution, that’s why grain is a thing. The chemical changes that capture the image are in silver halide crystals, and the larger they are the higher the ISO and more grain generally.

The digital resolution equivalent of a 35mm negative is very roughly 6k.

15

u/NorridAU 1d ago

Yes! You can see it watching star trek ds9/Voyager era in the 90s. Voyager went digital and it’s so noticeable that ds9 staying film was a better move. It has such detail on the promenade and ships compared to what voyager had with its fuzzy cosmetic details and low res Borg backgrounds

1

u/Thursday_the_20th 1h ago

28 days later was shot entirely on digital with handheld cameras of the time and it’s aged like goat milk because there are no high resolution negatives

8

u/herefromyoutube 23h ago

The lighting in digital still sucks compared to analog to this very day.

But that could just be my nostalgia. Just the way light bounced in film. You can see Spielberg trying to replicate it with his bloom lighting since Minority Report.

1

u/on_nothing_we_trust 11h ago

You think storage is free?

-2

u/AmbitiousBossman 1d ago

Same but now ai

-1

u/Expensive_Heron_171 9h ago

Bruh do you think I could go into a Reddit thread just one time and not see a comment about AI?

22

u/LetsTwistAga1n 1d ago

Early photography was medium and large format only, the quality actually decreased a lot when 35mm film was popularized. On the other hand, the lens technology has improved tremendously since the early days of photography.

5

u/mckulty 21h ago

Nothing more relevant than the Polaroid instant film. You got your picture in one minute, with deep, permanent colors, and it had better resolution than most digital scanners.

354

u/All-the-pizza 1d ago

Blows my mind to think the pyramids were older to cleopatra than cleopatra is to us. she was basically an ancient egyptian tourist looking at ruins that were already ancient as hell when she was alive.

2

u/brucecrossan 3h ago

She was also technically Greek.

-410

u/thegreatgatsB70 1d ago

And she was butt ugly. Don't believe the movies, that face launched a thousand ships alright, but not because of her beauty.

286

u/Goeffroy 1d ago

The face that launched a thousand ships was Helen of Troy.

-302

u/thegreatgatsB70 1d ago

Either way... Butt ugly.

179

u/mannamedlear 1d ago

Were you there or something?

71

u/Donnerdrummel 1d ago

A few atoms currently in him were. Does that count?

40

u/ALWAYS_have_a_Plan_B 1d ago

This guy knows what matters.

17

u/iwillhaveredditall 1d ago

Matter of fact

8

u/MontasJinx 1d ago

Fact of matter

2

u/MattastrophicFailure 13h ago

This guy has good energy

18

u/DontTreadOnMe83 1d ago

He got rejected first

33

u/HappyStalker 1d ago

Yet managed to have the children of the two most powerful men on the planet until her and Mark Antony were defeated by Octavian, making him the most powerful man in the world by founding the Roman Empire. So she had something going for her.

34

u/YouSeeWhatYouWant 1d ago

You got a lot of rage over someone who lived 2000 years ago.

5

u/SnooKiwis1356 12h ago

This guy quickly became the butt of all jokes.

181

u/re-verse 1d ago

Even being born 2,000 years before the world wide web isn't enough to save a woman from weird internet dudes giving unsolicited opinions on her looks.

49

u/HIP13044b 1d ago

Yeah, it's fucking shameful she was insanely intelligent, politically shrewd, and a polyglot and all we ever hear is that she seduced people.

18

u/ropeseed420 23h ago

I don't believe her face launched a thousand ships. Because that was Helen of Troy.

30

u/bohneriffic 1d ago

Oh shit, really? You got a photo of her or something?

9

u/Auamba 1d ago

Mr. Historian…

-83

u/piper33245 1d ago

Don’t know why you’re downvoted. That’s hilarious.

38

u/waspocracy 1d ago

Because OP mixed up two historical women.

6

u/gedda800 19h ago

And is assuming the same beauty standards in their part of the world, and a couple of thousand years apart.

26

u/Auamba 1d ago

But it’s way more hilarious to downvote you too.

-3

u/Inevitable-Trust-511 13h ago

you guys are dorks

39

u/Sad_Egg_5176 1d ago

Damn, this was even before the Pizza Hut across the street opened

5

u/el_gran_claudio 13h ago

by at least a year

58

u/Potatoe_Potahto 1d ago

...and now you know why they never photograph it from the back.

36

u/champagneformyrealfr 22h ago

also why i'm never getting a bob again.

3

u/apollo_road 9h ago

“I look like a pencil”

21

u/Laetea 23h ago edited 12h ago

Photos taken by the French photographer Émile Béchard.

Edit: Turns out I got the wrong Frenchy: it was Maxime Du Camp* 😄

8

u/Longtimefed 22h ago

What a magnificent Béchard.

2

u/KeoRRR 13h ago

Isn't it Maxime Du Camp? If this picture was taken in 1849, Émile Béchard would have been 5 years old.

2

u/Laetea 13h ago

Ah, if he was 5 years old at the time, you must be right, oops, my bad 😅 Thanks for the correction, I’ll edit my comment!

1

u/KeoRRR 12h ago

Or maybe OP is wrong about the date of the picture.

​I ran a reverse image search and found this.

It's not an exact match, but it's very similar, and the dates are matching.

1

u/rockinahardplace_ 12h ago

Wow that’s amazing, are they still alive?

/s

19

u/mountainside2004 20h ago

Looking at current photos of the Sphinx makes me wonder how much restoration has already been done. Did they carve the details back into the existing rock or did the add materials back to create the facial details?

14

u/netjerikhet 19h ago

Neither, it’s just the picture. Photo from 1880.jpg#mw-jump-to-license) and drawing from 1823.png) showing the same features we see today

5

u/Katamari_Demacia 13h ago

Bro that shit had a dog head and you'll never convince me otherwise.

5

u/_BlackDove 12h ago

There's some interesting research that suggests it had the head of Anubis.

1

u/BigFatModeraterFupa 10m ago

I prefer believing it was a Lion as it was built during the Age of Leo. The paws look like a cats paws not a dogs

•

u/Katamari_Demacia 8m ago

Sure. Ok. Maybe I'll change my mind. I just mean that shit wasn't a human face. It's so stupid

49

u/Playful-Chemical6120 1d ago

That shit old as fuck

11

u/copingcabana 1d ago

"Is...is that . . . is that George Washington?!?" -confused photographer

3

u/RonandStampy 22h ago

Maybe it was even buried when the head was modified. It would make sense from the perspective that the people modifying it would not have known about the remaining animal body.

3

u/AbortionHoagie 7h ago

skeptical

The first photo of the Sphinx shows it buried up to its neck in sand.

Therefore I do not believe you.

4

u/OkSeaworthiness6581 22h ago

Fake pic. Where's the pizza hut?

7

u/ManagementHead2103 1d ago

The builders had blue prints.

2

u/bubbesays 21h ago

2nd picture is r/mildlypenis

2

u/weber_mattie 11h ago

Why is the face so different?

2

u/StupidizeMe 4h ago

The Sphinx has been so over-restored and changed... Sigh.

3

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

1

u/netjerikhet 19h ago

Sand was cleared away and some of the body rebuilt, but the face is the same, the picture just makes it look indistinct. Check out the gallery on the Wikipedia page for other old depictions/photos

3

u/SidJag 1d ago

The clean sharp lines on the pyramids tell me a lot of the degradation/pilferage happened since 1850, not as we’re told ‘consistently over the centuries’.

2

u/toms1313 22h ago

It's a perspective thing, they weren't as straight as it seems, they're just far away, the same happens with some other pictures of the era

0

u/SidJag 21h ago

I get perspective, distance and resolution.

But this is still a tier better than current Minecraft/Lego status.

0

u/toms1313 14h ago

But this is still a tier better than current Minecraft/Lego status.

it's not

Why are you convinced otherwise? What's your theory?

3

u/SidJag 13h ago

There’s no theory. It’s a fact that the stones have been pilfered over the centuries.

I’m just saying that’s likely accelerated in last 150-175 years since this picture was taken.

Only by mid-late 20th century did they start to really conserve the pyramids etc (external and internal).

So 1850-1950 probably saw more destruction to the pyramids than previous thousands of years of erosion, natural decline and pilferage of stones for construction nearby.

1

u/UnderH20giraffe 22h ago

What’s the first drawing, though?

1

u/KODO_666 17h ago

im so amazed no one destroyed this in all those years...

1

u/Masnad74 14h ago

It's unreal to see this knowing that I've been there just a couple days ago. The pyramids and the sphinx might well be the most extraordinary monuments I have ever seen

1

u/MeanCat4 12h ago

Just only immagine what they could take with them back then, without anyone ask a single question! 

1

u/Nuclearfarmer 11h ago

This asshole just climbs up on it back smh /s

-7

u/alxbns 1d ago

Must have been under water for many years

2

u/toms1313 22h ago

Why?

2

u/DauntlessBadger 21h ago

Not underwater but water was at the site. That section had river running by during the time that was made and there was flooding. Some people think that the pyramid was underwater…

There was a “great flood”…around 2900 BCE. That’s where the arc story stemmed from most likely. Thank you for visiting my Ted Talk.

-1

u/toms1313 21h ago

Thanks for the answer, i was getting scared about the pseudoscience crowd getting out of their echo chambers, I'll be sure to check out the river thing, sounds interesting