It was, for most of them, the first happy time in their lives, and for some, the last and only. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal, penned the Civilian Conservation Corps into existence. Its primary goal was job creation: young men, aged 17-28, could sign up to work as unskilled laborers, usually on projects to develop the nation’s national parks and forests.
Here's a commercial Vivitar ran about a decade ago to convince older picture-takers to switch back to simple film cameras from the frustrating world of digital.
Digital cameras can see in color in near darkness these days, but decades ago, there were very different solutions for capturing usable photos at night. One example is the photoflash bomb, a special type of bomb that was designed specifically to explode in midair and illuminate the world below for aerial photos.
A new exhibition in Los Angeles will feature crime scene photos captured by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department from between 1925 and the 1970s.
Photographs have the power to bring issues to the forefront of public consciousness and spark change in society. Here's a 6.5-minute video by Vox that tells the story of how photographer Lewis Wickes Hine helped end child labor in the United States.
In my work travels, I recently met someone who gave me an interesting gift. Several years back he had been driving down a back road in Virginia and came across an old, abandoned farmhouse. He stopped and peeked in to see if anyone was using the place (you can’t be too careful about what you run across that looks abandoned these days), and saw only cobwebs.
YouTuber Guy Jones created this 20-minute video that offers a brief history of street photography. It's a slideshow of 182 photos -- one photo for every year between 1838 and 2019.
It is June 15th, 1999. The box office is being dominated by the release of the first new Star Wars in 16 years, even though it is tainted by one Jar Jar Binks. Until this day, photography was largely dominated by a technology that had existed for over a hundred years. It was a technology pioneered by George Eastman in his invention called, the Kodak. Over the many years from 1885 onward, it became known to the photographic community and to the world as “film.”
Want to see what life in the streets of Paris was like over a century ago in the late 1890s? Film restorer Guy Jones collected old footage shot between 1896 and 1900, slowed it down to a natural speed, and added sound for ambiance. This beautiful 6-minute experience is what resulted.
Want to see how the city of San Francisco has transformed over the past century? Here's a neat set of then-and-now photos showing old shots of The City by the Bay next to modern pictures shot in the same locations.
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.