interesting

You know those iconic photos of NASA Apollo astronauts posing with the US flag on the moon? The 3-minute video above is a "behind-the-scenes" video that shows some of the portraits being shot.

Do you know who the most photographed American of the 19th century was? It's not George Custer (155 photos) or Walt Whitman or Abraham Lincoln (130 each). The person with the most portraits made of them in the 1800s was Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist, speaker, writer, and statesman.

Are you curious about what goes on inside an airliner cockpit during takeoff and landing? If so, the Swiss …

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."

Did you know that you can easily see geostationary satellites by shooting time-lapse photos of the night sky? Reddit user jannne took his camera outside this week and managed to capture a number of satellites in their photos.

Back in 2012, photography broadcaster Frederick Van Johnson conducted this short 6-minute video …

Want to see what it was like to work as a photographer at a major newspaper back in 1983? Check out this blast from the past: it's a 20-minute video by photographer Hugh Wesley, who spent 28 years at the Toronto Sun before retiring as the director of photography in 2001.

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

Photographers are often advised to carry their camera gear onto an airplane rather than check it in with luggage. If you'd like to see what goes on behind the scenes with checked-in luggage, check out this interesting video by Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in the Netherlands, which strapped a camera to a piece of baggage and put it through the maze-like conveyor belt system.

Want to see how much you can overexpose C-41 color negative film and still get usable shots? Photographer Daniel Lachman of Retro Camera Review decided to film out recently after coming across a broken Mamiya 645E with a busted light meter.

In rural Butler, Pennsylvania, hidden away 220 feet under the hills is one of the most valuable priceless photo collections in the world. That's where a company called Iron Mountain helps store Corbis gigantic collection of historical photos in a refrigerated, maximum security vault.

We've taken a couple of looks at this vault in the past, once in 2011 and again in 2014. The 6-minute video above is yet another look at Iron Mountain's fascinating facility: in addition to showing the photo collection in the mines, it takes a step back and gives us a better picture of what the whole underground operation is like.

Popular YouTube personality Michael Stevens of VSauce posted this interesting 12-minute video yesterday explaining the optical science behind the "Moon Terminator Illusion" and the "Dolly Zoom Effect" (AKA the Hitchcock zoom).

I recently took a Polaroid picture photo, but it turned out to be a dud... so I decided to dissect it for science!

Here's an interesting side effect of Facebook's popularity in photo sharing: printed Facebook photo screenshots. Reddit user OutbackBrah was recently taking a look at some photos his aunt printed at Walmart and was surprised to find that they were screenshots taken inside Facebook's mobile app.

Did you know that back in 2010, scientists managed to calculate the orbit of a comet using amateur photographs found on the Internet? It worked with a high degree of accuracy, and it was a brilliant idea for using crowdsourced photos in an unconventional way.

This year, Getty Images celebrated 20 years as one of the preeminent photo databases in the world. To celebrate its birthday, the company has launched a new set of ads showing how four famous individuals have aged over the past 20 years, as seen through photos found in the Getty archives.

We're entering the days of 4K, 5K, and 8K monitors becoming a standard feature of workspaces, but just 30 years ago the best selling computers could only display fractions of a megapixel in resolution. The Commodore 64, the best-selling computer of all time from 1982, had a "high-resolution" mode of just 320x200 and a normal multicolor bitmapped mode of 160x200.

64yourself is a new web app that lets you see what your modern digital photos would have looked like back in the day on a C64 machine.

Did you know that when you capture a natural light photo, it took those photons about 8.3 minutes to …

Nick Marsh has been a forensic photographer for over two decades over the UK, and he offers his forensic imaging consulting services to the London MET police. He has even written a book about the subject, titled "Forensic Photography: A Practitioner's Guide."

The video above is an episode of the British television detective drama Midsomer Murders titled "Picture of Innocence." It originally aired back in June of 2007 and tells the story of a rivalry between a "traditional" (AKA film) photographer and a digital one leading up to a village's annual photo exhibition.

This is quite a bit out in left field, but check out this pasta limiter that's currently one of the hot new releases over on Amazon. It's essentially an aperture that's designed for pasta rather than light.

Underwater photographer John Ng was diving off the coast of the Maldives last month when he noticed something stuck among the rocks and coral reef at the bottom of the ocean. After a recovery and investigation, it turned out to be an underwater camera that had been lost last year -- a camera that was still perfectly functional.

Photographer Matthew Rycroft put together this video containing 13 strange, random, and mind-bending "facts" about photography. These are short and seemingly obvious statements that may make you stop and think.

During the total solar eclipse on March 20th, 2015, the Faroese doom metal band Hamferð took the opportunity to …

When Peter Lik sold a print to a collector for $6.5 million last year, people balked at the news. Lik is known to be a savvy businessman who has raked in over $440 million by churning out and selling his "collectible" prints to deep-pocketed people who want to invest in his art, so why should his prints be worth so much?

The Internet media channel LifeHunters recently did a social experiment that explores how people perceive and value art. They placed a $10 IKEA print in the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and asked "art experts" what they thought about it.

The Ganges river in India and Bangladesh is the holiest river in Hinduism. Every day, hundreds of dead bodies …

Photoshop experts who teach the software for a living generally know it like the back of their hand. But …

A video posted by Paul Luning (@pluning) on Feb 14, 2015 at 9:45am PST

Maho Beach in the Caribbean islands is famous for being a place where you can stand directly under airliners as they're landing at Princess Juliana International Airport. With giant airplanes roaring so close overhead, the beach is a popular photo spot that results in some unbelievable images.

Photographer and travel blogger Paul Luning recently paid a visit to the beach, capturing the eye-opening video above that shows just how close the planes come to the people on the beach below.

Back in 1966, renowned photographer Jay Maisel purchased a giant 6-floor, 35,000-square-foot, 72-room building at 190 Bowery in Manhattan for $102,000. The former NYC bank became his family's home for the next half century, and the purchase has been described as possibly "the greatest real estate coup of all time".

Here's why: in late 2014, Maisel sold the valuable property to real estate investor Aby Rosen for a whopping $55 million.

Before the days of digital magic, people had to rely on clever film techniques and chemical processes for "green screen" (or chroma key) compositing. Tom Scott created the short video above that provides a quick overview of the techniques that were used.

If you want to see the mechanics of how a modern DSLR shutter works, one way to do so is through slow-motion captured with a high-speed camera. That's what Gavin Free of The Slow Mo Guys recently did by pointing a Phantom Flex at his Canon 7D and capturing what goes on inside the mirror box during exposures of various shutter speeds.

By slowing down the movements after shooting at up to 10,000 frames per second, we get to see exactly what goes on in the camera in the blink of an eye.

If you’d like a primer on the technologies found inside Canon’s EF line of lenses, look no further than …

Of all the millions of historical photographs held by the US National Archives, the photo above is the single most requested. It was captured in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970, and shows Elvis Presley meeting then US President Richard Nixon.

How does your daily schedule compare to the 24-hour routines of some of the most famous creative individuals throughout …

Here's an interesting look at the magic that goes into making movies look the way they do. The video above shows how scenes in one particular movie looked straight out of the camera compared to the finished version after color grading. It's like the video equivalent of the before-and-after post-processing examples photographers often share on the Web.

What is the current state of the professional photography industry in the United States? Back in April 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released statistics about the photography profession from May 2013. The data offers an interesting look into where photographers are living and how much they're earning.

Up until recently, Tao Liu was just an unknown water meter reader in China with an interest in photography. Then people started noticing his clever photos captured on sidewalks, and now Liu has become one of China's hottest street photographers.

Desislav Iliev was out walking his girlfriend's dogs in Chicago when he noticed a Google Street View camera car driving by in front of him. Pulling out his smartphone, he snapped the above photograph of his dogs staring at the car.

Astronaut and photographer Chris Hadfield recently paid a visit to the …

Back in 2012, we wrote about a project called "Pixel Trade" by Australian photographer Shantanu Starick. The basic idea was simple but crazy: Starick wanted to travel through all seven continents on the globe without ever spending any currency. Instead, he would try to trade his services as a photographer to people willing to provide him with shelter, food, and transportation.

Starick recently appeared at Behance's 99U to give a 20-minute talk on spending the past two years living on photos instead of money.