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.
Back in 2001, this music video made the rounds on the Web before "going viral" was even a thing. It's for the hit song "Because I'm a Girl" by the Korean pop trio KISS (the video above is the English version sung by one of the members). The story is about a photographer's expression of true love.
In 1921, the satirical magazine The Judge published this two-panel comic about how you look in photos. It's strikingly similar to the "Expectation vs. Reality" memes that circulate the Web today, and the comic is one of the earliest recorded memes.
Back in 1911, the Swedish film production company Svenska Biografteatern visited New York City during a trip to America and shot footage of various street scenes. The film has survived through the years in mint condition, and YouTuber Guy Jones created this fascinating 8-minute edit after slowing down the footage to a natural rate and adding in ambient sounds.
Here's a strange and beautiful photo of a lava dome during a volcanic eruption. It's not just any bubble, though: the dome pictured is rising a whopping 65 feet (20m) into the air.
When you think of GoPro, you probably picture a neat, compact digital action camera, but the original GoPro was actually a 35mm film camera. Here's a 7-minute video by Thirty Five Studio that takes a look at the camera and shows what it can do.
Photographer Lewis Wickes Hine once said: "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."
There are plenty of new digital camera unboxing videos these days, but they're generally not like this one. Lazy Game Reviews got its hands on an Epson PhotoPC and created this 11-minute video showing what it was like to unbox and use a digital camera back in 1995.
Carl Størmer was a Norwegian mathematician and physicist who's best known for number theory and studying auroras. Aside from his intellectual pursuits, Størmer was also an avid street photographer. When he was a 19-year-old college student, he used a hidden spy camera to shoot street photos in Norway in the 1890s.
As Central Asia was transformed under Soviet rule, one man made a remarkable record of life in the fledgling Uzbek S.S.R. before being driven from his career and toward tragedy.
Think Photoshop runs slowly on your computer? To make yourself feel better, check out how "fast" basic Photoshop operations were 20 years ago. Here's a short clip of the Photoshop demo that was given at Macworld Expo in 1997 to show the speed of a new CPU.
On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that sparked huge fires, destroying over 80% of the city and killing roughly 3,000 people. Immediately before and after the earthquake, cameras captured dashcam-style footage while traveling down Market Street, and those films now provide an idea of how SF was changed through the quake.
Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910 in the German state of Stuttgart to a middle-class Jewish Galician family. She attended a Swiss boarding school, where she learned English and French and grew up receiving a secular education. In spite of her bourgeois origins, she became part of socialist and labor movements while still very young.
For those in North America, the solar eclipse on August 21st, 2017, could be the most photographed, viewed, and observed eclipse of all time. But back in 1851, cameras were in short supply, and that was the year the very first photograph was taken of a solar eclipse.
Photographer Martijn van Oers of the Netherlands recently visited a thrift store and came across an original Zeiss Ikon 520/2 folding camera, which was produced in Germany between 1929 and 1937. To his surprise, the camera contained a roll of exposed film in it.
For their recent 10th anniversary, Steve and Danielle VanHorn hired photographer Vanessa Hoffmann of Giggle Monster Photography to do a photo shoot. But it wasn't just any ol' photo shoot -- it was a 1980s-themed one complete with lasers, tube socks, and Spandex.
Every legendary photographer had to start somewhere. Before Ansel Adams became a household name in the photo industry, he was working hard at improving his skills and growing his business like any photographer early in their career.
Buried in the depths of the Internet, these two interviews from 1999 with some very famous names in photography might just give you the inspiration you need for your next shoot.
Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” is one of the most famous photographs ever taken. But who was the woman featured in the portrait? This 7-minute video from Today I Found Out delves in to the complete story behind the image.
Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.
The Rolleidoscop was made from 1926 to 1939 in Germany alongside the Heidoscop, the same camera but with a sheet film or glass plate back. It was actually the very first camera that renowned manufacturer Rollei made.
I dropped it because I was drunk. It was a brand new Canon EOS-1D Mark II, and I was drunk because I hadn't eaten any dinner. It fell from hip-height onto the sand-covered floor of a shipping container, which had been converted into a tiki bar at an outdoor music festival. It was 2005 -- tiki bars were a thing back then.
You may not realize it, but you probably unconsciously date video footage based on the resolution. The higher the definition, the newer you assume the footage is, which is why this HD video of New York City recorded in 1993 just looks strange.
Back in 2009, someone had the bright idea of doing an iconic photo shoot showing Air Force One flying low over New York City. The airplane triggered panic among New Yorkers who thought it was another 9/11-style terrorist attack, causing people to evacuate buildings and run for their lives.
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.
Back in 1984, Minolta launched a camera called the Minolta AF-S V. Marketed in the United States as the "Minolta Talker," the camera would actually speak to the photographer using it.
I often frequent my local Goodwill at least once a week. I'm usually partial to picking up vinyl, vintage sweaters, cameras, typewriters, and books. Somehow this week was different.
It's easy to take memory cards for granted and forget how far we've come, but that 256GB microSD card in your camera bag is nothing short of a modern day miracle. Don't believe us? Just check out this "blast from the past" tour of old digital cameras that used floppy disks as their "memory cards".
Want to see the state of cameras and photography back in 1948? Check out the 15-minute training film above, created by the US Navy in 1948. It's titled "Fundamentals of Photography: The Basic Camera."
Few mayoral photographers can list a billionaire and possible presidential candidates as subjects in their retrospectives. Ed Reed is one of the few. His career over the last 30 years — and five administrations — has documented the highs and lows of this nation’s largest city.
Over in Peoria, Illinois, a box of nearly 200 glass negatives from the late 1800s and early 1900s has been found in the corner of the attic in a condemned house.
This is a story about my photography portfolio that went missing for 30 years. I made this collection of photographs while working as a photographer at the Goldstream Gazette, a weekly newspaper on Vancouver Island from 1976 to 1978.
The Tessina is a vintage Swiss camera that was created by an Austraian chemical engineer named Rudolph Steineck and introduced in 1957 in Switzerland. What's neat about the camera was that one of the accessories was a special wrist bracket that allowed you to wear the camera on your wrist like a watch.
Back in the heyday of film photography, a common part of the photography experience was dropping off your film rolls at a store or lab, placing the roll in an envelope and checking boxes with instructions for what you'd like. Here's a fascinating 5-minute video that reveals what happened to your film between drop off and delivery of your prints and processed film.
Stop-motion photography has come a long way since the early 1900s, but it still involves creating an animation one frame at a time by introducing slight changes and movements between still photos. To see how far we've come with the technique, check out this 3-minute video, titled "The Evolution of Stop-Motion."
Join us as we take a nostalgic trip into photography's hey day. It's 1978, and you're a fly on the wall at Contact Press Images, working with world-class photojournalist David Burnett on a photo essay about the last traditional cattle drive.
"The manufacturers have found a way of storing a whole roll of transparencies onto a tiny disk," says Tomorrow's World presenter Maggie Philbin in this short clip. But she couldn't have guessed how primitive that groundbreaking floppy disk technology would seem just 30 years later.
Everything is Terrible found a couple of cringeworthy photography instructional videos from decades ago.
If you were into photography in the early days of digital cameras, you probably remember the "revolutionary" Sony Mavica line, which used 3.5-inch floppy disks as 1.44MB "memory cards".
What’s in a viewfinder? The view within a viewfinder has always been an opportunity to display additional information to the user. In this post, we'll take a quick look at 8 film SLR and rangefinder camera viewfinders.