history

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.

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.

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 fun little piece of photography trivia: did you know that when it was released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was the world's smallest digital camera?

Here's a 3-minute video that explores why you almost never see portraits of smiling people from the early days of photography.

When the Leica camera was born in the early 1900s, it was the first practical 35mm camera to use standard 35mm cinema film. In 1930, Leica introduced the Leica I Schraubgewinde, which used an interchangeable lens system based on the Leica LTM (Leica Thread Mount) 39mm screw thread.

Want a peek of the inner workings of Leica's early LTM camera? Today's your lucky day.

During the Great Depression, the US government launched the largest photography project it ever sponsored by sending photographers across the country to document America. Of the 170,000 photos captured by photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein, some of them showed other photographers at work with their cameras.

We've gathered together a collection of photos showing photographers during the Great Depression (and the few years following it) between 1935 and 1946.

Want a crash course on the history of photography? COOPH just published this …

Here's a video you need to watch if you enjoy seeing and learning about photography history. The folks over at Objectivity recently paid a visit to The Royal Society, where they were shown a set of priceless items from photography history.

In addition to a set of super expensive early photos from the 1850s, they were also shown one of the earliest descriptions of photography: a 1839 paper by William Henry Fox Talbot titled: "Some Account on the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or: the Process By Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Deliniate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil."

Did you know that sports and political TV commentator Keith Olbermann used to be a photographer? A number of his photos were purchased by Donruss (now known as Panini) back in 1981 for its first set of baseball cards.

This year's NFL championship game is Super Bowl 50, and it'll be played on February 7th, 2016, at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California (the home of the 49ers). To celebrate what is often the most watched TV broadcast of the entire year in the United States, Sports Illustrated is spending 50 days posting 50 iconic photos from each Super Bowl to the magazine's Instagram page.

The Federal Art Project was a Depression-era program that launched in 1935 to fund projects by visual artists in the US. That same year, American photographer Berenice Abbott received funding for a "Changing New York" photo project to document New York City.

She shot 305 photos for the project between 1935 and 1939, and her work was published in a photo book and distributed to public institutions in New York.

This week, the New York Public Library announced that it has released 187,000+ high-resolution digital images of public domain items in its collection.

Last month, Filmmaker IQ put out a great 13-minute video on …

After exploring the science of digital camera sensors, Filmmaker IQ just …

Want to see how the look of portraits have evolved with major camera developments throughout history? Photographer Leo Rosas Morin of COOPH shot 11 portraits of 1 model, and using Photoshop, he recreated the aesthetics of 11 key moments in photography history.

Tips from the Top Floor podcast host Chris Marquardt recently got a private …

Smiling is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of photography. If you take a look at photos from many decades ago, people commonly wore stoic expressions on their faces and portraits were a much more serious affair.

Researchers at UC Berkeley recently crunched through an enormous trove of high school yearbook photos to show how smiling and portraits have evolved over the past 100+ years.

These are the first and last photos that were taken by NASA's Apollo mission astronauts on the surface of the moon. They bookend the entire set of lunar images that can be found in the Project Apollo Archive.

Photo colorizer Jordan Lloyd of Dynamichrome was recently commissioned to digitally color reconstructed photos of the discovery and exploration of Tutankhaten's tomb starting in 1922.

Here's an interesting blast from the past: in 1965, the US Army released the 25-minute film above to teach the basics of photography (for military police purposes).

Want to see a super early example of a photo being faked through compositing? Look no further than this circa 1902 photo, titled "General Grant at City Point." It appears to show General Ulysses S. Grant posing on a horse with a large number of soldiers in the background, but it's actually the combination of three different photos.

In 1966, Bob Dylan released his 7th studio album, titled "Blonde on Blonde," which went double-platinum and contained some of Dylan's best-known songs. It's also known for it's unusual cover photo. It's a blurry portrait of Dylan, created by photographer Jerry Schatzberg in New York City's meat-packing district.

The blur was the result of camera shake and, despite what many people think, was unintentional -- the photo is blurry simply because Schatzberg was cold and shivering.

If you grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, you probably know Elmer Fudd as the hunter whose life mission is to capture or kill Bugs Bunny. But did you know that Fudd's character originally started out as a wildlife photographer? In the first episode featuring Fudd, he's actually a photographer trying to shoot his bunny nemesis with a camera rather than a hunter trying to shoot him with a gun.

Rich Clarkson’s photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, in the 1968 NCAA Men’s National Basketball Final Four semifinal game in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of composition, timing and exposure. The square format is the result of shooting the game action with a Hasselblad – a practice that continued into the early 2000s. But that isn’t what makes this photo historically interesting.

Back in 2010, a man named Randy Guijarro in Fresno, California, found and purchased an old tintype photo for $2 at a junk shop. It turns out that photo is worth up to $5 million because it's only the second authenticated picture that shows the famous outlaw Billy the Kid.

Poet Edgar Allan Poe had glowing things to say about photography after it exploded onto the scene in the mid-1800s. Other commentators in those days weren't so kind.

There are quite a few cartoons from the 1800s that show a more pessimistic view of photography and its emergence in the world.

Did you know that when the daguerreotype was announced back in 1839, one of the people who wrote about the new groundbreaking technology was the famous poet Edgar Allan Poe?

After the world's first publicly announced photographic process was unveiled in January 1839, Poe wrote an article for the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly Messenger in January 1840 titled, "The Daguerreotype." In the piece, Poe called the invention "perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science."

The first known photograph was captured in 1826 when light reacted with a particular type of asphalt known as Bitumen of Judea. Since that first natural light photo, photographers have introduced artificial flash lighting to photos through all kinds of different ways. In this post, we're taking a look at a brief history of the camera flash -- from its humble beginnings with explosive powder and burning metal up through the latest LED lights -- to see how far it has come.

Back in July of 1956, Kodak printed a helpful photography guide for Disneyland visitors. The pamphlet was titled: "Kodak Camera Tour of Disneyland" and featured colorful illustrations, technical camera tips, and sample photos.

Vox has published a short 5-minute video that tells the story of how early film stocks in photography were designed with light skin as the ideal skin standard, and therefore sometimes had problems rendering darker skins -- especially in photos that showed both darker and lighter complexions.

The YouTube channel Found Footage Fest scoured thrift stores and purchased old modeling …

Here's an interesting little video showing the various camera rigs that were used to shoot movie scenes back in 1993, from steadicams to RC helicopters.

"Photoshopped" photos may be everywhere these days, but retouching images to make them look nicer has been around since the early days of photography -- it was just done differently through the years as new techniques and technologies emerged.

British photographer Tony Richards owns a number of old plates that were likely made during the age of the albumen print in the mid-to-late 1800s. Close inspection of the plates reveals the retouching that was done to the portraits after they were created.