Carl Gregory

Carl Gregory was born on Sep 09, 1882 in USA. Carl Gregory's big-screen debut came with Nicholas Nickleby directed by George Nichols in 1912.

Pioneering cinematographer Carl Louis Gregory was born in Walnut, KS, in 1882. He and his family moved to Ohio, where, at age 11 he became interested in photography and made his own camera using a cigar box and a lens made from a pair of eyeglasses. While a student at a Cleveland high school he began earning a living taking photographs, and made enough money from that business to pay his tuition at Ohio State University. He also studied at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Columbia University. In 1905, a year after graduating from OSU, he opened a photography studio with branches in Cleveland, Colorado Springs (CO), San Antonio (TX) and even Monterrey, Mexico. He soon sold those businesses and went to work for the US Department of the Interior as an official photographer. A few years later he was hired by a wealthy businessman as a projectionist for slides and film that were shown during the man's lectures. In 1909 he joined the Edison Co. as a cameraman and director and turned out quite a few films at the company's New Jersey studios in Orange and Bedford Park. He even went to Cuba to shoot features and short educational films. He joined the Thanhouser Co. in 1910 as a cameraman/photographer and later became the studio's chief cameraman, shooting many of its films and supervising cinematographers on other projects. Renowned for his trick photography and seamless use of double-exposures, he was often mentioned whenever newspapers or magazines wrote about the technical aspects of the relatively new film business.