John Ott
American photographer (1909–2000)
John Nash Ott (23 October 1909 – 6 April 2000) was a photo-researcher, writer, photographer, and cinematographer who was an early adopter of many modern photographic practices, including time-lapse photography and full-spectrum lighting.
Photography
Ott's early career was in finance. He never went to college, although he enrolled in finance courses at Harvard Business School while working for several Chicago area banks. During this period, he developed an interest in time-lapse photography. He made his first time-lapse film in 1927, while he was still in high school, but did not develop the automated mechanical camera rig he used in his later films until 1937. His early amateur films led him to a career in cinematography. In addition to making films, he performed research about the effects of natural lighting on plants, animals, and humans.
Initially, Ott's interest in time-lapse movie photography, mostly of plants, was just a hobby. Starting in the 1930s, Ott bought and built more and more time-lapse equipment, eventually building a large greenhouse full of plants, cameras, and self-built automated electric moving camera systems (the first movie camera motion control systems ever built) for moving the cameras to follow the growth of plants as they developed. He time-lapsed his entire greenhouse of plants and cameras as they all worked and grew.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Ott” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.