Photographer Gary Albertson calls himself “the luckiest unlucky guy in the world.” In 2010, after decades spent shooting the outdoors, he developed a rare form of glaucoma that has left him with little more than a circle of peripheral vision in each eye. But after some time away from the camera he’s come back stronger than ever, creating photography so stunning he’s attracted the attention of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist. Read more…

While it is true that photo apps are in high demand and, therefore, a dime a dozen, we were still surprised to find out that rapper Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dogg) decided to branch into the market himself. In partnership with Upper Playground, 99centbrains and Cashmere Agency, the rapper has officially broken into the smartphone photography game with his new app Snoopify. Read more…

As Google Glass ramps up to the point where it’s eventually available to the general public, app developers are looking to get in on the ground floor and start developing for the platform early on. Naturally, several of those apps will seek to provide an Instagram-like service for Glass users, and the first to jump on this bandwagon is an app called Glassagram. Read more…

With the prevalence of smartphones and the massive photo community that is Instagram, it’s no surprise that news outlets and journalists are more and more frequently turning to the service to source photos for major events. Unfortunately, Instagram’s search functionality is almost non-existent. That’s where the new open-source search tool QIS comes into play. Read more…

Frenchman Joe Bunni is not a photographer; first and foremost he’s a dentist. Once you learn that, the fact that he captured the above photo and won the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award in 2011 is even more incredible. The photo shows a polar bear swimming not more than a few feet away from Bunni, and if you think the photo is amazing, wait until you hear the story behind it. Read more…

All of his life, French photographer Pierre Carreau has been fascinated by the shape and movement of waves. It makes sense, then, that much of his photography revolves around the project “AquaViva” — a series that captures the majesty of waves in action. Read more…

The Civil War wasn’t the first war to be photographed, but the leaps and bounds that photographic technology had taken leading up to the war in 1861 enabled American photographers at the time to come out en masse when news of the attack on Fort Sumter came.

Many photos came out of the war, showing everything from the horrifically scarred back of an escaped slave, to the bravado of young confederate soldiers. In the video above, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Photography and the American Civil War” exhibit Jeff L. Rosenheim walks us through some of those photos, explaining the role each one played in documenting four years of bloodshed. Read more…

At a public lecture in Pittsburgh in 1934, four hundred lucky students were privy to a lecture by Albert Einstein, in which the great man mathematically derived his famous mass-energy equivalence equation: E=mc². What you see above is a photo from that lecture, and what is thought to be the only surviving photo that shows Einstein working on that derivation. Read more…

Icebreakers are the bouncers of the ship world. With specially designed thicker hulls shaped to direct ice to the sides and under the ship, they ram into massive ice pockets and drive their way through, sometimes climbing up onto the ice to crack it under the ship’s weight.

For the last couple of months, marine scientist Cassandra Brooks has been on one of these massive machines called the Nathaniel B. Palmer in the Ross Sea, and she’s decided to upload a hyperlapse to prove it and take us on a two month ice breaking research voyage in the process. Read more…