This Japanese Machine Gun Camera Was Used in World War II
A Japanese "machine gun" camera has popped on eBay. The camera, which was used in war-time during the World War II era, can be yours for a price of $4,499.
A Japanese "machine gun" camera has popped on eBay. The camera, which was used in war-time during the World War II era, can be yours for a price of $4,499.
The word "selfie" exploded into the mainstream over the past 5 years, but self-portraits have obviously been around much, much longer. Sarah Burton of BuzzFeed recently set out to discover the origins of the selfie. In this 7-minute video, take a trip through the history back to the birth of the selfie.
Carl Størmer was a Norwegian mathematician and physicist who's best known for number theory and studying auroras. Aside from his intellectual pursuits, Størmer was also an avid street photographer. When he was a 19-year-old college student, he used a hidden spy camera to shoot street photos in Norway in the 1890s.
Want an unusual camera that you can pretty much guarantee that no one around you has? A rare World War II German "gun camera" has popped up over on eBay. It's a Zeiss Ikon camera that was mounted to fighter planes to shoot dogfights.
As Central Asia was transformed under Soviet rule, one man made a remarkable record of life in the fledgling Uzbek S.S.R. before being driven from his career and toward tragedy.
Here's a beautiful photo from over 100 years ago that shows two Native Americans looking at a strip of photographic film against the sky. It's a black-and-white photo that was colorized by colorization artist Jecinci.
Did you know that there are only two known photos in existence that show the US Supreme Court in session? Cameras have long been banned inside the courtroom, so the only two photos were captured many decades ago by people who snuck cameras in.
On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that sparked huge fires, destroying over 80% of the city and killing roughly 3,000 people. Immediately before and after the earthquake, cameras captured dashcam-style footage while traveling down Market Street, and those films now provide an idea of how SF was changed through the quake.
Back in March 1843, the sixth US president (serving from 1825–1829), John Quincy Adams, sat for a portrait photo in a Washington studio. Fast forward to the modern day, and the photo is now the oldest surviving photo of a U.S. president. It's going to auction and carries an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000.
Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910 in the German state of Stuttgart to a middle-class Jewish Galician family. She attended a Swiss boarding school, where she learned English and French and grew up receiving a secular education. In spite of her bourgeois origins, she became part of socialist and labor movements while still very young.
For a few years now, I’ve had in my collection one very strange lens. I bought it primarily for its value as a collectible so, up until now, I haven’t really spent much time playing with it. Made in 1975, this manual focus Minolta MC Rokkor-X 40-80mm f/2.8 lens is one strange puppy.
Every legendary photographer had to start somewhere. Before Ansel Adams became a household name in the photo industry, he was working hard at improving his skills and growing his business like any photographer early in their career.
"The Forgotten Dream" is a new project by Hungarian photographer and Photoshop artist Flora Borsi. She found black-and-white photos of immigrants arriving in the United States in the early 1900s, colorized them, and Photoshopped the people into modern-day photos of New York City.
Europeana.eu has launched a searchable online gallery of more than 2 million historical photographs, which catalog the first 100 years of photography in Europe.
Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.
Due to costs and scarcity, the vast majority of photos captured during World War II were shot on black-and-white film. Some images were captured in color, however, and those rare shots reveal what scenes from the Second World War looked like to people in them.
The Canon EOS (Electro-Optical System) ecosystem was born 30 years ago with the introduction of the Canon EOS 650 35mm SLR on March 2nd, 1987. Since then, over 70 EOS cameras have been launched. Here's a 1.5-minute video by Digital Camera Warehouse that shows the evolution of EOS cameras over three decades.
Marina Amaral is a 21-year-old Brazilian retoucher who is receiving widespread acclaim for her work adding color to famous historical B&W photos.
If you have $200,000 to spare, you may soon be able to buy one of two early Leica RIFLE sets that were first sold back in July 1938. The cameras will be auctioned at Leica's 30th WestLicht camera auction on November 19th.
It is estimated that over 99% of all species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct, and a number of notable ones have disappeared just over the past century. Thanks to the existence of cameras, however, we have a more accurate visual record of what some recently extinct animals looked like.
Ernest Brooks was the first official photographer appointed by the British military, and he ended up shooting over 1/10 of all official British photos made during World War I. The 8-minute video above is a look at photography during the "Great War" and the life and work of Ernest Brooks.
Back in 1967, Swedish National Television was granted a rare interview with Hasselblad founder Victor Hasselblad at his sea-side home in Sweden. In the 30-minute segment above, Hasselblad talks about everything from designing his first camera to dealing with copycats in Japan.
Over in Peoria, Illinois, a box of nearly 200 glass negatives from the late 1800s and early 1900s has been found in the corner of the attic in a condemned house.
Back in the heyday of film photography, a common part of the photography experience was dropping off your film rolls at a store or lab, placing the roll in an envelope and checking boxes with instructions for what you'd like. Here's a fascinating 5-minute video that reveals what happened to your film between drop off and delivery of your prints and processed film.
Before marrying President John F. Kennedy and becoming the First Lady of the United States, Jacqueline "Jackie" Kennedy once earned $42.50 per week as the "inquiring camera girl" for the Washington Times-Herald. Some of her personally used camera gear is now for sale on eBay.
Here's an amazing find: the George Eastman Museum has announced that it has acquired two unopened boxes of 1880s Kodak film.
About a year ago, Levi Bettwieser of the Rescued Film Project won about 20 auctions for the undeveloped work of a 1950s photographer. What he received was 66 bundles of film containing a staggering 1,200 unprocessed rolls.
Exploring the former house-monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party is one of the most exciting explorations I have ever done.
Today, a week after an exhibition titled ‘Bourne and Shepherd: Figures in Time’ came to a close in the plush locality of south Delhi, India, Bourne and Shepherd, Asia’s first and the world’s longest functioning photography studio, is closing up shop in Kolkata after 176 years.
Phil Grishayev is an LA video producer with an interesting hobby: he revisit iconic locations from his favorite films and recreates the same shot to show the location "then and now."
Ask a photo nerd and they'll tell you that the world's first digital camera was invented in the 70s by Steve Sasson while working at Kodak (oh, the irony). But did you know that it's Fuji, not Kodak, who claims they invented the world's first "fully" or "truly" digital camera? It's true.
Abandoned places are an alluring subject matter for many photographers. Japan is a treasure trove of abandoned places, or "haikyo", due to a perfect storm of an ageing population, a burst economic bubble in the 80s, and land tax loop holes.
Want to see what photo studios were like a century ago? Turkish artist Ali Alamedy recently spent 9 months building a 1900s photo studio... as a miniature tabletop diorama.
Colorizing retoucher Jordan J. Lloyd of Dynamichrome took vintage photographs of global landmarks under construction and added color to them to give us a different look at history.
Here's an amazing short film titled "The Old New World" by photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov of Moscow, Russia. Zakharov found old photos of US cities from the early 1900s and brought them to life.
Professional photographers sometimes gripe about how casual shooters undercut their businesses by offering (often) lesser quality work for pennies on the dollar. But it's not something that was brought on by cheap and accessible digital cameras -- this "problem" has been around from the early days of photography.
During the Great Depression in the US, the government had a role in creating the "golden age of American photography" by paying some of the best photographers to document the country. While many iconic shots emerged, other shots that weren't as good were "killed"... with a hole punch.
In 1918, photographer Dorothea Lange left New York on a trip to travel the world. That ambitious trip was cut short by a robbery, and Lange ended up settling in the San Francisco Bay Area and opening a studio there. During the Great Depression, Langue took her camera out of the studio and onto the streets to document the country for the Farm Security Administration.
Here's a 3-minute segment that recently aired on CBS This Morning about the soldier photographers who risked their lives on the front line to document the combat in photos and videos.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, one of the big cameras used by sports photographers was the Graflex "Big Bertha," a giant 120 lb camera that shoots 5x7 photos. At least one of these cameras is still seeing action.