Archived astro-photos & the visual digitization of history

One of the more enjoyable phases of writing a non-fiction book is reaching the home stretch and compiling photos. I'm not quite at that stage yet in my biography of Robert Ripley. (Although here's a sampling of pics that'll likely end up in the book).

It's been seven years since I collected photos for my first book, Light This Candle, my bio of astronaut Alan Shepard. I scored some nice shots from NASA (free of charge, thank you very much) and from Corbis and Getty Images (not so free). At the time, online access to free digital photos was pretty limited. Recently, a blogger named Laura (who posts astronaut photos at her Tumblr site) introduced me to a trove of outtakes from Life magazine's archives. Life profiled Shepard in 1961, after he became America's first man in space. I had a blast skimming through these unreleased images of Shepard, his fellow astronauts, and family, extras from that 1961 photo shoot. So I thought I'd share…

Batch one ~ Batch two

Great stuff, and I wish I'd had access to these for my book. (My thanks to Laura and her appropriately named astro-fan site, LightThisCandle; also thanks to Space and Stuff)