Phil Grishayev is an LA video producer with an interesting hobby: he revisit iconic locations from his favorite films and recreates the same shot to show the location "then and now."
Ask a photo nerd and they'll tell you that the world's first digital camera was invented in the 70s by Steve Sasson while working at Kodak (oh, the irony). But did you know that it's Fuji, not Kodak, who claims they invented the world's first "fully" or "truly" digital camera? It's true.
Abandoned places are an alluring subject matter for many photographers. Japan is a treasure trove of abandoned places, or "haikyo", due to a perfect storm of an ageing population, a burst economic bubble in the 80s, and land tax loop holes.
Want to see what photo studios were like a century ago? Turkish artist Ali Alamedy recently spent 9 months building a 1900s photo studio... as a miniature tabletop diorama.
Colorizing retoucher Jordan J. Lloyd of Dynamichrome took vintage photographs of global landmarks under construction and added color to them to give us a different look at history.
Here's an amazing short film titled "The Old New World" by photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov of Moscow, Russia. Zakharov found old photos of US cities from the early 1900s and brought them to life.
Professional photographers sometimes gripe about how casual shooters undercut their businesses by offering (often) lesser quality work for pennies on the dollar. But it's not something that was brought on by cheap and accessible digital cameras -- this "problem" has been around from the early days of photography.
During the Great Depression in the US, the government had a role in creating the "golden age of American photography" by paying some of the best photographers to document the country. While many iconic shots emerged, other shots that weren't as good were "killed"... with a hole punch.
In 1918, photographer Dorothea Lange left New York on a trip to travel the world. That ambitious trip was cut short by a robbery, and Lange ended up settling in the San Francisco Bay Area and opening a studio there. During the Great Depression, Langue took her camera out of the studio and onto the streets to document the country for the Farm Security Administration.
Here's a 3-minute segment that recently aired on CBS This Morning about the soldier photographers who risked their lives on the front line to document the combat in photos and videos.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, one of the big cameras used by sports photographers was the Graflex "Big Bertha," a giant 120 lb camera that shoots 5x7 photos. At least one of these cameras is still seeing action.
Here's a 3-minute video that explores why you almost never see portraits of smiling people from the early days of photography.
When the Leica camera was born in the early 1900s, it was the first practical 35mm camera to use standard 35mm cinema film. In 1930, Leica introduced the Leica I Schraubgewinde, which used an interchangeable lens system based on the Leica LTM (Leica Thread Mount) 39mm screw thread.
Want a peek of the inner workings of Leica's early LTM camera? Today's your lucky day.
During the Great Depression, the US government launched the largest photography project it ever sponsored by sending photographers across the country to document America. Of the 170,000 photos captured by photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein, some of them showed other photographers at work with their cameras.
We've gathered together a collection of photos showing photographers during the Great Depression (and the few years following it) between 1935 and 1946.
Here's a video you need to watch if you enjoy seeing and learning about photography history. The folks over at Objectivity recently paid a visit to The Royal Society, where they were shown a set of priceless items from photography history.
In addition to a set of super expensive early photos from the 1850s, they were also shown one of the earliest descriptions of photography: a 1839 paper by William Henry Fox Talbot titled: "Some Account on the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or: the Process By Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Deliniate Themselves Without the Aid of the Artist's Pencil."
Did you know that sports and political TV commentator Keith Olbermann used to be a photographer? A number of his photos were purchased by Donruss (now known as Panini) back in 1981 for its first set of baseball 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.
The Federal Art Project was a Depression-era program that launched in 1935 to fund projects by visual artists in the US. That same year, American photographer Berenice Abbott received funding for a "Changing New York" photo project to document New York City.
She shot 305 photos for the project between 1935 and 1939, and her work was published in a photo book and distributed to public institutions in New York.
This week, the New York Public Library announced that it has released 187,000+ high-resolution digital images of public domain items in its collection.
Want to see how the look of portraits have evolved with major camera developments throughout history? Photographer Leo Rosas Morin of COOPH shot 11 portraits of 1 model, and using Photoshop, he recreated the aesthetics of 11 key moments in photography history.
Back in 1909, a super-rich French banker named Albert Kahn decided to create a photographic record of the world using the new color photography process that had just appeared, the Autochrome Lumière. He commissioned 4 photographers to take their cameras to places all over the world. One of the cities they documented was Paris.
Charles M. Conlon was an early 20th century American photographer who was among the first to regularly photograph baseball games and players. Although he shot many iconic early photos of the sport, his name was largely unknown until 1990, when 8,000+ of his negatives were found in the archives of Sporting News.
Many of the photos were heavily marked, and the Digital Archive Project at the National Baseball Hall of Fame has been working to restore those images for future generations.
Between 1985 and 1991, ABC, A&E, and The Travel Channel aired a weekly half-hour TV show for photographers titled "World of Photography." The show was a big influence on a generation of photographers, exposing them to new photographers and photography techniques.
If you were a fan of the show back then, there's some great news for you now: hundreds of segments from the show can now be found on YouTube.
Back in 1907, a photo retoucher named C.H. Claudy wrote an article for Volume 17 of Camera magazine titled "Faking the Negative." In the piece, Claudy describes the latest and greatest techniques for "faking a photo" at the time.
John Green of vlogbrothers made this interesting 2-minute video in which he talks about his favorite photo: a picture titled "Young Farmers" by German photographer August Sander. Upon first glance, it may look like a simple snapshot of three nicely dressed men walking along a road, but there's so much you can learn about the photo by examining it closely and by looking at the cultural context.
Ansel Adams is best known for his breathtaking landscape photos, but he photographed much more than nature during his decades-long career. In 1943, already the best-known American photographer, Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, one of the relocation camps the US gathered Japanese-Americans into during World War II.
Photo colorizer Jordan Lloyd of Dynamichrome was recently commissioned to digitally color reconstructed photos of the discovery and exploration of Tutankhaten's tomb starting in 1922.
Do you know who the most photographed American of the 19th century was? It's not George Custer (155 photos) or Walt Whitman or Abraham Lincoln (130 each). The person with the most portraits made of them in the 1800s was Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist, speaker, writer, and statesman.
Here's an interesting blast from the past: in 1965, the US Army released the 25-minute film above to teach the basics of photography (for military police purposes).
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.