Earlier this week, the British Museum made nearly 2 million high-resolution photographs and images of artifacts within their collection available to the public, allowing you to download and use the images under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
It was early 2000, and the world looked on towards a new and exciting millennium, thankful that their worst fears surrounding Y2K never surfaced. At the time, I was getting ready to launch my portrait photography business using a completely digital capture and workflow, and was intent on investing in the Nikon D1 as my primary camera.
I don’t remember the first time I became aware of my family photo album, but from a very young age I always found looking at those photos a time absorbing, and totally enthralling pastime. I would sit for long periods of time staring at those familiar faces, all those captured moments of times gone by, and lose myself in a world of wonder.
If you look at album covers from the 1970s, one of the things you'll repeatedly see is a particular type of wicker chair commonly referred to as a peacock chair. Here's an interesting 7.5-minute video by Vox that looks into the history of this photography trope, which was 100 years in the making.
Many years ago, my mother handed me a shoebox filled with negatives shot and developed by my father who died when I was very young. The negatives were obviously from a makeshift darkroom: hand-trimmed, inconsistent in every possible way, marked with nicks and thumbtack holes.
Sotheby's has announced the contents of its upcoming Spring photography auction, and it's quite the lineup. The April 3rd auction will include photos by Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and a salt print by Roger Fenton that's thought to be one of the earliest war photographs ever made.
It was my younger years. I had just published work from the Sudanese Civil War, and the Editor-in-Chief of Germany's GEO magazine, wrote that “Per-Andre risks life and limb for a good shot." Basically, I presume he meant I was a young fool, who took on assignments very few in their clear mind would consider.
The hybrid processes from the transition to digital photography generated lots of garbage, cheap stuff to experiment with. This story is about one of these discoveries.
The Smithsonian just made a public domain contribution that it's calling "unprecedented in both depth and breadth." In one fell swoop, the institution is adding over 2.8 million images to an online platform called Open Access, where you can browse and download images for free.
I used to work for Nikon cameras. From 1995 through 1999, I was Nikon UK’s Senior Photographic Advisor. My job was basically to be the guy in the building who knew what a camera was for!
Now these are some cast portraits we can really get behind. On-set photographer Wilson Webb recently got the chance to photograph the entire cast of Best Picture nominee Little Women, but instead of shooting glitzy studio portraits, he decided to stay historically accurate and capture wet plate collodion portraits instead.
Late last week, controversial free stock photography website Unsplash announced that the Library of Congress, CDC, the New York Public Library and 10 other major institutions would be adding hundreds of scientific and historic images from their collection to the site's archive.
Back in the Tsarist era, a fad for posing in fake boats, planes, and automobiles resulted in some of Russia’s quaintest portraits.
Paris Musées, a group of 14 public museums in Paris, has made a splash by releasing high-res digital images for over 100,000 artworks through a new online portal. All the works were released to the public domain (CC0, or "No Rights Reserved"), and they include 62,599 historic photos by some of the most famous French photographers such as Eugene Atget.
Photography has never been faster to made and share than in our modern "insta" era, but over half a century ago, it was American scientist Edwin Land and his company Polaroid that helped the industry take a giant step forward in speed and ease. PBS NewsHour just aired this 5-minute segment that looks at Polaroid's history and influence.
I am writing this after getting a torrent of texts from friends and family who have been watching the documentary Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez on Netflix. It turns out I'm in it... an image of me on set with Aaron appears in the second episode.
It’s a weird bond and a strange badge of honor that I’ve never strayed from Nikon. I love photography, but I also marvel at the tool itself. I am also honored to have worked on many advertising campaigns for Nikon in Japan, from cameras like the D600 and the never introduced pocket DL, to making sample photos for a variety of new Nikon lenses.
If you know me, then you know I love a good one-liner. In fact, I put together what may be the best collection of portrait photography quotes in history. But even I can get sick of hearing the same old pearls of wisdom from the same old boomers. So I’ve upgraded 10 famous photography quotes so they make more sense in our modern photography world.
Well-known (and controversial) photographer and gear reviewer Ken Rockwell recently put together a fascinating video that is probably best described as a crash course in Nikon lens history. The video covers 100 years worth of Nikon's optical heritage, from the company's original rangefinder glass all the way to the latest lenses for the brand new Z-mount.
In an entertaining holiday-themed video that's part educational and part "bah humbug," YouTuber Azriel Knight explains how Kodak managed to ruin Christmas for two decades of photographers. It's a fascinating story of schmaltzy ads, dead film formats, and a huge patent lawsuit that cost them almost $1 billion.
In a behind the scenes video worthy of r/oddlysatisfying, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) joins expert conservator Lee Ann Daffner to show you what it takes to clean, rehouse, and ultimately save one of the oldest photographs on Earth from being eaten away by its own chemistry.
When you hear the name Magic Lantern, you probably think of third-party Canon firmware. But long before there was such a thing as firmware, or Canon for that matter, there was the Magic Lantern projector.
If you're a fan of instant photography, Polaroid, or you just like the history of photography, you'll love this Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera ad that resurfaced online over the weekend. The 11-minute ad gives an in-depth look at every aspect of this iconic, folding instant film camera that is still beloved today.
There's an unbelievable auction currently live on eBay that might rank as the most expensive item we've ever seen on the site. Uncovered by the folks over at The Phoblographer, the auction is offering hundreds of historic WWII prints, a Kodak Pocket camera, and an extremely rare negative of the Hiroshima bombing, all for the whopping buy-it-now price of $2,000,000.33.
A largely forgotten bit of photographic history might be of interest: the civil war between realism and pictorialism.
The DUGA over-the-horizon radar was one of the most important elements of the early warning system against an American nuclear attack on the USSR. More expensive to build than the nearby nuclear power plant, the complex consisted to two massive sets of receiving antennas located in Chernobyl and one transmission unit—which no longer exists—60km away in the town of Lubech-1.
There are plenty of well-known firsts in the history of photography, but the question of what the oldest animal photo is has thus far been an unsettled one. But a newly-surfaced photo of cows may possibly be the oldest animal photograph discovered thus far.
The Marine Corps has confirmed that one of the six marines in the iconic photograph "Flag Raising on Iwo Jima" has been misidentified for over 70 years. The man who was thought to be Pfc Rene Gagnon was, in fact, Cpl Harold “Pie” Keller.
To mark the 159th anniversary of the first aerial photo in the United States, CBS Sunday Morning aired this 2-minute Almanac segment about the landmark photo by photographer James Wallace Black and how aerial photography has developed since then.
A set of historical photographs of the Amazon captured by German photographer Albert Frisch over 150 years ago have sold at Sotheby's auction house for $81,250. The images offer a rare, fascinating glimpse at what life was like in Brazil's Upper Amazon.
I'm Martin from the All About Street Photography channel, and today I would like to talk about a photo taken by legendary war photographer Robert Capa -- a photo that is both very famous and also somewhat controversial.
It was, for most of them, the first happy time in their lives, and for some, the last and only. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal, penned the Civilian Conservation Corps into existence. Its primary goal was job creation: young men, aged 17-28, could sign up to work as unskilled laborers, usually on projects to develop the nation’s national parks and forests.
Digital cameras can see in color in near darkness these days, but decades ago, there were very different solutions for capturing usable photos at night. One example is the photoflash bomb, a special type of bomb that was designed specifically to explode in midair and illuminate the world below for aerial photos.
Legendary photographer Edward Weston was one of the most influential photographers in American history, and in this short video, we get to go back in time, visit his home, and watch him process one of his negatives from start to finish.
Michaël Tirat, a wet plate photographer based in Bordeaux, France, has created something pretty special. In an attempt to make his photography services more portable, he's created a mobile darkroom on a tricycle that enables him to capture wet plates photography all over the city.
Did you ever dive into an I Spy book as a kid? These photo books were filled with incredibly detailed images that showed tens, sometimes hundreds of objects in a single shot, and challenged children to find specific items within those pictures. And each illustration was captured using real objects by photographer Walter Wick.
This year the Reno Rodeo is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and photojournalist Ty O'Neil decided to photograph it in a way that would pay proper homage to that history: by capturing the 100-year-old rodeo with a 100-year-old lens.
In 1976, NASA sold the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing to then-intern Gary George by accident. The tapes were part of a set of 65 boxes of 2-inch videotapes that George bought for the whopping price of $217.77. Those same tapes are scheduled to be auctioned off through Sotheby's on July 20th with a starting bid of $700,000, and an expected worth of up to $2 Million.
A new exhibition in Los Angeles will feature crime scene photos captured by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department from between 1925 and the 1970s.
This month, Hasselblad is celebrating the 50th anniversary of becoming "the first camera on the moon." And in addition to sharing some beautiful photos taken of and with the iconic Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) and Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC) used on the moon, they also shared a bit of fascinating history: their original moon landing press release from 1969.