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."
This historic photograph was captured in 1861, on a day when the United States teetered on the brink of Civil War and Abraham Lincoln was being sworn in as the country's 16th president. And yesterday, one of the few prints of the photo in existence sold for a whopping $27,500.
If you ever try your hand at light painting photography with burning steel wool, be extra careful with safety and legality. Just a few months after a photographer allegedly destroyed a historic shipwreck in California with his sparks, another steel wool photo shoot has burned down a historic 1920s building in a US national preserve.
Holy crowdfunding success Batman! Lomography has done it again, and by "done it" we mean launched an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign. Their new Daguerreotype Achromat 2.9/64 Art Lens just went up on Kickstarter this morning at 5am Eastern time, and by 2pm it had already broken $200K in funding!
Ethan Field and Ron Campbell were hiking off-trail in Oregon's Columbia Gorge last week when something shiny caught their eye. Bending over, they discovered an old camera that was mostly covered by rocks, dirt, and vegetation.
If you've always dreamed of owning a Leica repair business, now's your chance to do so. A complete Leica service business has popped up on eBay. It was previously owned by a Factory Authorized Leica service agent, and his complete set of tools and resources can now be yours for $138,216.
Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay was the busiest immigrant inspection station in the United States at the dawn of the 20th century, with millions of immigrants arrived in the United States via the island by boat.
Amateur photographer Augustus Sherman was the Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk for a number of years in the early 1900s, and he used his special access to shoot portraits of many of the immigrants who passed through the station.
After traveling nine years and three billion miles, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft finally reached the dwarf planet Pluto today. To celebrate, NASA released this final and sharpest photo of the dwarf planet captured before the historic flyby.
The North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina was home to top NASCAR races from when it opened in 1949 through when it closed in 1996. It reopened briefly in 2010 but was shuttered again in 2011. Since then, it has been lying dormant as investors and businesses sort out the fate of the historic racetrack.
Photographer Seph Lawless recently paid the track a visit, capturing what the location currently looks like years after it was bustling with racing fans and speeding cars.
The British government is scrambling to keep a rare photo album from the 19th century from being sold to a foreigner and exported from the nation. It announced today that it has placed a temporary export ban on the book, which contains seventy photographs by Swedish photography pioneer Oscar Gustave Rejlander.
This video is a "then-and-now" comparison showing the Dutch city of Alkmaar in 1914 and in 2014. It was created by Dutch photographer Frits de Beer, Tara Rikkers and Michael de Vreugd, Alkmaar natives who wanted to see how his city had changed over the past 100 years.
It seems CNN is planning to do a whole series with famed portraitist Platon, because only a couple of weeks after they released his BTS account of the portrait he took of Vladimir Putin, they've put out another, much more powerful video.
Britons are seeing a new side of the nation's World War I experience thanks to the publication of a small treasure trove of negatives that were only recently discovered tucked away in someone's attic.
The idea isn't entirely new. At one point, photographer Allen Murabayashi experimented with re-imagining famous photos as if they had been taken with Instagram to dispel the thought that filters and a square crop often somehow "improve" a photo.
The website Histagrams is similar, only it takes it a step further and lends a comedic edge to the whole experiment. Site creators Gusto NYC and Gavin Alaoen imagine how historically significant moments might have been shared if the people behind them had had Instagram at their disposal.
About a year ago, I was sitting around narcissistically Google-ing myself when I came across the photo above of "Robert C. Paetz + Mother". It was dated 1923 and was being sold for $12 by a man named Paul in Northern California.
I quickly did the math and figured it was my 93-year-old grandfather and my great-grandmother, Matilda (who eventually lived until 102 when I was 16).
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."
I am not anti-Instgram, nor am I anti-cellphone photography. But there is a tendency to believe that the art filters that are readily available with many cellphone photo apps somehow “improve” reality. Many of the frequently used filters either significantly boost color saturation, or try to give the appearance of an antiqued, polaroid-esque photo.
But this doesn’t mean it’s better than a more true-to-life image. To prove my point, here are a few iconic photos “re-taken” with art filters a la Instagram. Do you agree?
The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called "The Lively Morgue" to breathe new life into items in the newspaper's photo archive (nicknamed "The Morgue"). Each week they'll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection.
Based on a recently published patent filing, Canon appears to be working on putting aperture rings on EF-mount lenses …
Canon sent out this teaser yesterday stating that it’s going to be making some kind of game-changing announcement on …
After a seven year journey that involved being slingshotted around the planets in our solar system, NASA's MESSENGER probe entered Mercury's orbit on March 17th, 2011. Yesterday the probe beamed back the first photograph ever taken of the planet from orbit (seen above).