trivia

As 2023 comes to a close, it’s time to look back on the biggest events, moments in pop culture, and news over the last year. Of course, one way the year will be remembered for decades to come is through photographs. Here, we’ll look at the 10 most photographed of 2023.

We're about to take a trip back in time to the early 1960s and learn how a $40 drugstore camera forced NASA to rethink its space missions. Yes, it’s true. A simple camera purchased at the local drugstore played a pivotal role in shaping the future of space exploration and set the stage for space photography in a non-scientific domain.

Do you know as much as you think you do about photography as a whole? Test your photographic general knowledge with this fun little quiz.

In the past decade, Zeiss has launched a number of new lens lines for DSLR and mirrorless cameras with unusual-sounding names such as Batis, Otus, and Milvus. Perhaps you own one of these lenses, but did you know that each of those lens lines is named after a bird?

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.

Hollywood writer and director Rian Johnson—the man behind movies like Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and most recently Knives Out—revealed an interesting bit of filmmaking trivia during an interview with Vanity Fair yesterday: Apple won't let bad guys use iPhones on camera.

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.

Before EXIF data landed on the scene through the rise of digital photography, film cameras could superimpose the current date directly onto your photos, allowing you to see when you shot each one as you flipped through an album. If you've ever wondered how that date was included, here's an interesting 14-minute teardown by Applied Science that reveals the secret.

After the Apollo 11 mission that successfully landed the first humans on the Moon back in July 1969, a NASA photographer unexpectedly became the first non-astronaut to touch Moon dust with his bare hands.

You know you've established your photographic legacy when you show up as a clue on Jeopardy, and that's what happened to photographer Jeff Widener a few days ago. One of the clues on the ever-popular trivia game show focused on Widener's iconic "Tank Man" photo.

NASA’s Apollo Program was an audacious mission to send astronauts to the moon -- a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy’s in a bold speech in 1961 that was an ongoing part of the Cold War.

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.

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.

Sheep can recognize human faces in photos at a level that's comparable to humans. That's what scientists discovered through testing sheep by showing them celebrity portraits.

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.

Here's an interesting piece of trivia: did you know that flash memory is named after the camera flash?

Snapchat is known for popularizing the idea of the self-destructing photo, but did you know that long before Snapchat existed, Polaroid had already offered its own line of self-destructing Polaroid pictures? It was called the Fade to Black line.

We recently shared the impressive Canon DSLR arsenal Getty Images brought to the Rio 2016 Olympics. Here's something else that's impressive: the agency team of photographers and photo editors at the Games can snap, edit, and share official Olympic photos in as little as two minutes.

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.

Ever wonder how astronauts manage to take cameras outside the International Space Station, where the temperature of an object can reach 250°F in the sun and -250°F in the shade? Here's your answer!

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.

Have you ever wondered why some Canon lenses are white while most other lenses in the industry are black? No, it's not just for aesthetics and marketing... Canon has a technical reason for it: heat reduction.

The 2016 Grammy Awards will be held in Los Angeles next week, and this year the awards handed out will have something special: there's a camera built into the base of each trophy.

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.

Here's a quirky fact about photography and life: the lids of certain Häagen-Dazs ice cream containers make for perfect lens caps for 72mm lenses.

Here's something that most Nikon DSLR shooters probably know already, but perhaps some of you don't... Most Nikon DSLRs feature two small green dots somewhere near buttons on the back or top of the camera. Those dots tell you how to do a factory reset of your camera to default settings.

60 Minutes just aired a fascinating segment on Apple this past weekend, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the secretive and dominant company. Here's one of the crazy facts that was mentioned: Apple has 800 employees whose work is dedicated solely to the iPhone's camera.

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.