Memex 1.1

Wow! This is big news.

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today.

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it first.

Got up this morning, yawned and looked out of the bedroom window. This is what I saw. The light was magical just before 7am. Needless to say, the picture doesn’t capture it properly. Sigh. The story of every snapper’s life.

One of the delights of the Nikon D700 is that all my old Nikon glassware has come back into its own. This was taken earlier this evening with the ancient 50mm f1.2 lens at full aperture.

On a path in College this afternoon.

… in a nutshell.

Yep. See here.

Michael Dales has a wonderful picture on Flickr that he took at the Canadian War Memorial.

Spotted in Cambridge today. Naturally I checked to see what he was reading. The book was open at a chapter entitled “Fatness is Happiness”.