Photographs have the power to bring issues to the forefront of public consciousness and spark change in society. Here's a 6.5-minute video by Vox that tells the story of how photographer Lewis Wickes Hine helped end child labor in the United States.
A giant archive of 2,400 never-before-seen 9/11 photos have been discovered on a set of CDs purchased at an estate sale. The images show workers in the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York City.
YouTuber Guy Jones created this 20-minute video that offers a brief history of street photography. It's a slideshow of 182 photos -- one photo for every year between 1838 and 2019.
Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, was one of the infamous dictator's primary propagandists, and tens of thousands of the photographer's photos exist on glass plate negatives. Now a large number of those rare photos are being revealed with a new level of clarity through a digitization effort by the National Archives.
In the "Olden Days," professional science was still in its infancy. People who trained in science and practiced science were using every ounce of creativity and imagination at their disposal to discover the nature of the world. They were scrappy and inventive. In this article, I will outline a modern replication of the experiment that produced the first color photograph ever made.
Here's a 6-minute short animation by The Royal Ocean Film Society that offers a cynical and tongue-and-cheek account of how the camera came to be.
Before Instagram, selfie sticks, disposable cameras, Polaroids, and box brownies, there were carte de visites -- small photographic albumen prints, mounted on card, which were wildly popular during the Victorian era.
100 years from now, no one is going to care who I am. I know this. I don’t mean that in a bad way and I don’t say it in the hopes someone will contradict me and shower me with praise; this is not said as compliment bait.
I want to give you a brief overview of an investigation that began almost five years ago, led by me but involving the efforts of photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, photo historian Rob McElroy, and ex-infantryman and amateur military historian Charles Herrick.
Each year from summer of 1872, the owners of Glacier Point hotel started the event of Yosemite Firefall. For seven nights a week, they would spill hot embers from Glacier Point down to the valley 3000 feet below. The event ended in 1968 when the National Park Service ordered it to stop because the overwhelming number of visitors that it attracted overwhelmed the meadows, and because it was not a natural event. NPS wanted to preserve the Valley, returning it to its natural state.
Before the self timer and remote shutter release appeared in the world of cameras, photographers had a much trickier time getting themselves into group photos if they didn't have an assistant to help expose the shot. But a vintage photo has surfaced showing one photographer's clever solution to this problem.
Once a juggernaut of the photography industry, Kodak missed the boat when cameras shifted to digital. Cheddar published this interesting 7.5-minute video that looks at how the company that created the first digital camera in 1975 went bankrupt in 2012.
Dorothea Lange's 1936 photo Migrant Mother is an iconic photo of the Great Depression. The Nerdwriter made this fantastic 6-minute video that tells the behind-the-scenes "story of how Dorothea Lange created perhaps the most iconic photograph in American history."
U.S.-trained Afghans photographed the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. These rare color photos bring the U.S.S.R.'s "hidden war" to light.
Walking past booth after booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, I often heard camera company presenters explaining to their uncomfortably-seated, yet nonetheless-enraptured, audiences how they shot the “perfect” photo.
It has never been easier to shoot and share photos than in our modern Instagram age. The YouTube puppet web series Glove and Boots made this tongue-in-cheek 5-minute video on the "terrible history of photographs" to explain how much time and effort it took to do photography in past eras.
The camera superstore B&H Photo Video is the largest non-chain camera store in the United States and one of the (if not the) largest in the world. The store made this 1.5-minute video that tells the story of how the juggernaut of the industry came to be.
In the mid-1970s, 134 of the top photographers and curators in the world of photography posed for an unusual set of baseball cards that now sell for thousands of dollars as a complete set. The SF Museum of Modern Art just released this 4-minute video in which photographer Mike Mandel shares the story of how these cards came to be.
Want to see what life in the streets of Paris was like over a century ago in the late 1890s? Film restorer Guy Jones collected old footage shot between 1896 and 1900, slowed it down to a natural speed, and added sound for ambiance. This beautiful 6-minute experience is what resulted.
"Migrant Mother" by photographer Dorothea Lange is an iconic image of the Great Depression and one of the most famous photos in US history. But did you know that the photo was "Photoshopped"?
The Kodak moment is gone, but today Fujifilm thrives after a massive reorganization. Here is a detailed analysis based on firsthand accounts from top executives and factual financial data to understand how and why the destinies of two similar companies went in opposite directions.
In Russia’s arctic wilderness, the remnants of one of the Soviet Union’s most tragic gulag projects now lies largely forgotten.
Japan just made history by landing two small rovers on the surface of an asteroid hurtling through space 174 million miles (280 million km) from Earth, and here's the first published photo from the rovers shot from the surface of 162173 Ryugu.
Check out this monster of a camera. It was the world's largest camera back in 1900, built for the specific purpose of shooting the largest photo in the world of the "handsomest train in the world."
A while back, I had another roundtable discussion at the Film Photographers Association. This time the subject was Still Life Photography. It is a genre we all take for granted and include in it a great variety of photographs. I would like to explore the origins of still life in painting, how it came to photography, and eventually expanded in coverage and scope.
During the Cold War, the US enlisted the help of Kodak to create a satellite camera for spying on the Soviet Union. This 4-minute video by CNN is a look at the program and the former Kodak employees who "helped prevent World War III."
The mirrorless camera industry is about to blow up and we have Sony mirrorless to thank for this. This is how they achieved their massive success.
Last month it was reported that 23-year-old Tyler Mitchell would become the first black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue in the iconic fashion magazine's 125-year history, thanks to him being hand-picked by Beyonce for the job. It's now official, as his photos were just published.
We've seen Soviet spy cameras disguised as everything from a gold ring to a pack of cigarettes, but this recently auction Soviet spy camera was disguised as... a camera.
Photoshop 1.0 was first released as the Soviet Union was collapsing, but long before the software made photo manipulation easy, Kremlin censors went to extraordinary lengths to touch up history.
Often it is the backstory and the small stories behind a set of pictures that brings it all together. I posted the above picture back in 2011, photographed on film and included in a set of photos from an abandoned dye-works in Somerset, UK.
I ran across yet another case of Holy Cow Look At These Russian Photos, in which the photographs of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky were showcased. In 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky learned the method of shooting three negatives (color separations) and then projecting them in registration through filters to produce projected color images.
There's a new photo recovery technique that may help humanity recover some of the world's oldest photographs that were previously considered to be damaged beyond repair.
Decades before the word "selfie" exploded into popular culture, NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin shot the first space selfie while on a spacewalk during the Gemini 12 mission on November 12, 1966.
Kodak was once the 800-pound gorilla in the world of photography. But after a century of dominance, Kodak's business crumbled and it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2012. If you'd like to better understand what happened to the iconic brand, watch this great 12-minute video by the popular YouTube channel Company Man.
One of the biggest memes of 2017 was the ubiquitous "distracted boyfriend" photo that took over the Internet. The photo may have peaked in late 2017, but it appears that English actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin actually shot the very first "distracted boyfriend" nearly 100 years ago.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, chemists Robert Bunsen and Henry Roscoe and showed that burning magnesium produces artificial light that's similar to daylight. A man named Edward Sonstadt then brought the technology into the world of photography, and thus the idea for the photographic flash was born.
Did you know that before it became the most dominant photo editing program on Earth, Photoshop was first sold as "Barneyscan XP"?
Photographers often reminisce about the glory days of magazines, when they were given huge budgets, freedoms, and paychecks to create images. Here's one crazy example of what things were like then: People magazine once paid $10,000 for exclusive rights to a photo it didn't even want... just to keep it away from competitors.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?