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If you've gone to a concert or public event or even certain art openings recently, you'll notice that something is amiss. In the past, people would look, enjoy and try their best to experience the moment when they attended such things. Now, many of them are doing their best to craft the most likeable smartphone photo.

The BBC's Newsnight is troubled by this trend, and so they set out to discover if the smartphone photography movement is doing more harm than good.

Life magazine believed that pictures could change the world. And so, during the 40s, 50s and 60s, when the United States was at its most dynamic, Life provided the illustrations for the story of America.

Famed fashion photographer John Rankin Waddell and BBC Four went in search of the people who did this -- the photographers who led the charge and turned Life into a photojournalistic superpower. The documentary America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine (shown in its entirety above) is the result of that search.

If you've never attempted to photograph the night sky, be it a constellation or a planet, the idea may seem daunting. You may think that you need a specific type of camera or that you need to invest in a high-quality telescope.

While those things can be true in certain situations, astronomer Mark Thompson takes a minute in the video above to show you how to capture great photos of the night sky using very little in way of equipment.

This post could also be titled "How Not to Photograph Endangered Male Animals." The video above was uploaded to the Web by the BBC back in 2009 and shows photographer and zoologist Mark Carwardine finding and photographing a rare parrot in a New Zealand forest. Unfortunately for Carwardine -- and hilariously for the rest of us -- he gets closer to the bird than he was planning to.

If you're a fan of cinemagraphs, you should take a look at the nature cinemagraphs being created by 28-year-old Netherlands-based visual artist Marinus. He has been using frames from popular wildlife documentaries (BBC's Winterwatch, Wonders of Life, and Natural World), turning them into beautiful animated loops that offer glimpses into the great outdoors.

If you're going to infiltrate the world of penguins for an up close and personal documentary, you have to get creative. So, wildlife producer John Downer and camera operator Geoff Bell did just that.

By creating undercover cameras shaped as everything from rocks and pieces of ice, to several robotic penguin creations, they were able to get an incredibly intimate look at the lives of the world's best dressed birds.

If you ever find yourself wondering what it's like to be hunted by a hungry polar bear, just ask filmmaker Gordon Buchanan. While shooting wildlife imagery in Svalbard, Norway for a BBC series titled The Polar Bear Family and Me, Buchanan was approached by a giant 1,000lb, 8-foot-tall polar bear. Luckily for Buchanan, he was in a tiny Plexiglas enclosure. Luckily for the BBC, Buchanan was able to capture the 45-minute ordeal on film.

Nikon published a news post recently boasting that its D4 and D800 DSLRs had "become the first DSLR cameras to pass the very elaborate European Broadcasting Union (EBU) test, commonly referred to as the BBC Test."

The world's first color moving pictures have been discovered, dating back to 1902. The film sat forgotten in an old metal tin for 110 years before being found recently by Michael Harvey, the Curator of Cinematography at the National Media Museum in England. The pictures were part of a test reel of early color experiments by an Edwardian inventor named Edward Raymond Turner, and show Turners children, soldiers marching, domesticated birds, and even a girl on a swing set.

It's nearly impossible to find a photograph in China taken before 1970 -- most images were destroyed or removed to other countries during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

A professor at Bristol University in the UK is running a project in search of these lost images, the BBC reports:

Such photographs are exceptionally rare in China. The turbulent history of the 20th Century meant that many archives were destroyed by war, invasion and revolution. Mao Zedong's government regarded the past as a "black" time, to be erased in favour of the New China. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s finished the job.

"If you were at all savvy," says (Professor Robert) Bickers, "you realised early on that you had to destroy your own private family records, before the Red Guards came and found evidence of your bourgeois, counter-revolutionary past, when you might have drunk coffee in a café bar, à la mode."

Check your facts, check your sources, and then check your facts a few more times for good measure; that …

Here’s an amazing clip from the BBC series Frozen Planet. The film crew …

The next time you’re walking around with a DSLR around your neck and a stranger asks you for directions, …

Update: It looks like the video was taken down by the uploader. Sorry guys.

Color is simply how our brains respond to different wavelengths of light, and wavelengths outside the spectrum of visible light are invisible and colorless to us simply because our eyes can't detect them. Since colors are created in our brains, what if we all see colors differently from one another? BBC created a fascinating program called "Do You See What I See?" that explores this question, and the findings are pretty startling.

The Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” This clip from the BBC …

Lyrebirds are ground-dwelling Australian birds that have the remarkable ability to mimic sounds, …

You know you’re a professional photojournalist when you try to take good care of your cameras but they still …

In 1983 the BBC aired a series called "Master Photographers" in which they interviewed some of the biggest names in photography at the time, including Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The series can't be found anywhere on DVD, but luckily many of the episodes have been uploaded to YouTube. If you're at all interested in learning how historical greats worked and thought, this is a video series you have to bookmark and chew through.

If you're yearning to take photos of the great outdoors, the BBC Wildlife Magazine website now offers free downloadable Masterclasses.

Photographers often go through hours, days, or weeks of work to achieve certain photographs, and the dedication is usually reflected in the end result. That might seem like a lot of work to you if you typically only spend a few seconds framing and snapping a photograph, but what if I told you that a crew from BBC spent two years working on a 60 second clip?