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Comment by mladenkovacevic | Hacker News Reader

I think smiling for a photograph must be some sort of social training that humans either take to or don't.

I, for example, still find it very difficult and unnatural to smile for photographs unless I am already smiling about something else and the picture is just a candid moment caught at that time.

I would imagine that this old picture taking process (3 separate pictures with different filters each time) took quite a bit of time and subjects had to be posed for a a longer period of time. It would be very difficult to hold a smile for that long, and especially in those early photography days when the smiling-for-pictures convention still hasn't been established.

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Some of the pictures would have been impossible if the camera wasn't automatically swapping the filters very quickly. You can actually see the distortion is things moved around in the images and the colors separated, and there's even a sense of how fast they were moving. It seems to me that the pictures were taken in rapid succession indeed.

Quoth Wikipedia: "The exposure time of the frames is likely to have varied, even if the developed negatives were later on similar glass plates. In a letter to Leo Tolstoy requesting a photo session, Prokudin-Gorsky described each photo as taking one to three seconds, but, when recollecting his time with Tolstoy, he described a six-second exposure on a sunny day. Blaise Agüera y Arcas estimated the exposure of a 1909 photo taken in broad daylight to have had combined exposures of over a minute, using the movement of the moon as comparison."

It is probably a strange thing to say (i.e. common knowledge for others), but it only recently occurred to me that people develop a standard pose for photos. If you look at a family album or say Facebook or Flickr, and scroll through historic photos, the most "photogenic" people look almost identical. Those people will face in a certain direction with the same shape of smile and posture, it's almost freaky how identical they are! So it's obviously a practised/fake thing, that some learn to do while others remain oblivious. Back then, this concept would not have existed.

Early photos had very long exposures, with clamps used to hold people still. That may have set the expected look for a long time later.

reminds me of the story (not sure if it is true or not) of how the telephone revolutionised the world - prior to that, you had to be introduced to someone by a third party before you could speak to them; subsequent to the telephone the word 'hello' was invented. Or so the story goes

That's interesting, I never thought about that. It must've taken a great deal of willpower to not want to know everything about every new person you would talk to on other end of the line.

I imagine this would've been my first conversation with a random receptionist that's just trying to patch my call through: "Hello! We are speaking on the telephone! How's the weather over there!?"

Following that train of thought, I don't really remember my first time using the telephone, although I'm sure I was yelling the whole time.

Myth busted: http://www.pitara.com/discover/5wh/online.asp?story=184

Thanks for the link. Would have been nifty if 'Ahoy!' had of caught on!

This is the reference which backs up my point, however it makes it slightly more eloquently- saying that 'Hello' was a way to cut across Social barriers which were much more rigid before the invention:

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=AgLDhOySfMgC&lpg=PA3...

Ps apologies for the mess

It's not so much social training as it is the exposure time (which you also mentioned). Exposure time was so long that it was nearly impossible to smile in pictures. See for example the picture of the photographer himself at the stream - the running water in the river is a blur. I'm surprised the exposure time isn't that high in these pictures though. The shot of the workmen in the woodshop is distinctly modern by showing 'action'.

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