Want to see a super early example of a photo being faked through compositing? Look no further than this circa 1902 photo, titled "General Grant at City Point." It appears to show General Ulysses S. Grant posing on a horse with a large number of soldiers in the background, but it's actually the combination of three different photos.
In 1966, Bob Dylan released his 7th studio album, titled "Blonde on Blonde," which went double-platinum and contained some of Dylan's best-known songs. It's also known for it's unusual cover photo. It's a blurry portrait of Dylan, created by photographer Jerry Schatzberg in New York City's meat-packing district.
The blur was the result of camera shake and, despite what many people think, was unintentional -- the photo is blurry simply because Schatzberg was cold and shivering.
Rich Clarkson’s photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, in the 1968 NCAA Men’s National Basketball Final Four semifinal game in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of composition, timing and exposure. The square format is the result of shooting the game action with a Hasselblad – a practice that continued into the early 2000s. But that isn’t what makes this photo historically interesting.
Back in 2010, a man named Randy Guijarro in Fresno, California, found and purchased an old tintype photo for $2 at a junk shop. It turns out that photo is worth up to $5 million because it's only the second authenticated picture that shows the famous outlaw Billy the Kid.
Poet Edgar Allan Poe had glowing things to say about photography after it exploded onto the scene in the mid-1800s. Other commentators in those days weren't so kind.
There are quite a few cartoons from the 1800s that show a more pessimistic view of photography and its emergence in the world.
Did you know that when the daguerreotype was announced back in 1839, one of the people who wrote about the new groundbreaking technology was the famous poet Edgar Allan Poe?
After the world's first publicly announced photographic process was unveiled in January 1839, Poe wrote an article for the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly Messenger in January 1840 titled, "The Daguerreotype." In the piece, Poe called the invention "perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science."
Vox has published a short 5-minute video that tells the story of how early film stocks in photography were designed with light skin as the ideal skin standard, and therefore sometimes had problems rendering darker skins -- especially in photos that showed both darker and lighter complexions.
Here's an interesting little video showing the various camera rigs that were used to shoot movie scenes back in 1993, from steadicams to RC helicopters.
How have magazine covers and their photos changed over the past century? The answer sheds light on not just the design and image choices of major media companies, but changes in our cultures and the way we think as well.
Turns out my great-great-grandfather was a photographer. Born in 1850, Robert Stapleton served in the US Army for two five-year tours in the then-wild-west.
Australian toy photographer Ray of ToyShoots recently purchased this old school stereoscope that was apparently manufactured in 1896. It's the device people used to view stereoscopic photos as one 3D image (the View-Master, which was released in 1936, is also a stereoscope).
Earlier this year, former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr made an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late night talk show. One …
Rooftopping photographers have gotten a lot of attention and notoriety in recent days for climbing to extremely high points in cities and shooting photos while often teetering on the edge. It turns out photographers were already pulling similar stunts nearly a century ago.
The picture above (by an unknown photographer) shows a photographer taking a picture of New York City streets while standing high above on the corner of a skyscraper. It was taken sometime in the mid-1920s.
In our world of digital photography and high speed Internet, photojournalists can quickly and easily send large numbers of high-res photos to the other side of the globe. Things weren't always so convenient.
The video above shows what a photo transmitter looked like back in the 1970s. What you see is a United Press International UPI Model 16-S, which scanned photos and then transmitted them using a telephone line.
The Associated Press today announced that it will be uploading more than 550,000 historical video clips to YouTube, giving the public access to more than 1 million minutes of digitized film footage of notable events.
Want to see how far digital cameras have come over just the past 20 years? Check out this 4-minute clip that CNET released back in 1995, when digital cameras were only just starting to find their way into the hands of serious photographers.
Back in the 1970s, Olympus launched an advertising campaign for its Trip 35 35mm compact camera that featured renowned British photographer David Bailey. The 46-second commercial above is one of the ads that was aired: it depicted the popular racing driver James Hunt being confused for Bailey because of the Trip 35 he was shooting with.
Kaleta Bartosz was on a boat with his girlfriend off the coast of …
1,250 glass negatives from between 1910 and 1925 were recently found in the archives of the Swiss photo agency Keystone. After some thorough research work, it was concluded that the photos formed an important chapter of Swiss photographic history: they were shot by photographer Jules Decrauzat, widely considered now to be the first sports photographer and first major photojournalist in the history of Switzerland.
Collotype is a photo printing process that was invented by French photographer Alphonse Louis Poitevin back in 1856. Due to its ability to preserve fine detail in prints, the process was used to create fine art photo prints for many years before other processes arrived on the scene.
OldSF and OldNYC are two websites created by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, who gathered tens of thousands of historical photos of San Francisco and New York City and plotted them on city maps.
For the past two years, photographer Jordan Liles has been researching the life and work of George Bradford Brainerd, a lesser-known 19th-century photographer who shot 2,500 photos of New York before he died in 1887 at the age of 42.
Starting in 2013, Liles has also been visiting the locations of Brainerd's photos -- some of the oldest surviving images of New York -- recreating the shots to show how New York has changed over the past 140 years.
We're entering the days of 4K, 5K, and 8K monitors becoming a standard feature of workspaces, but just 30 years ago the best selling computers could only display fractions of a megapixel in resolution. The Commodore 64, the best-selling computer of all time from 1982, had a "high-resolution" mode of just 320x200 and a normal multicolor bitmapped mode of 160x200.
64yourself is a new web app that lets you see what your modern digital photos would have looked like back in the day on a C64 machine.
Mervyn O'Gorman was an English engineer whose artistic interests turned him into one of the early pioneers of color photography. Using the Autochrome Lumière process that was launched in 1907, O'Gorman shot images that are now regularly featured in exhibitions of early color photos.
Among his best known works are a series of color photos of his daughter, Christina, taken in 1913.
Check out the wonderful power cameras have in helping us relive old memories. The video above shows what happened …
A man named Andrew recently brought four old photographs by Edward Weston to Antiques Roadshow when the show made a stop in Santa Clara, California. After having his prints assessed by expert Aimee Pflieger, Andrew was surprised (and delighted) to learn that they are worth up to $260,000.
The Revolutionary War ended in 1783 and photography was invented in the 1820s and 1830s, so most of the veterans of the war didn't live long enough to have their portraits made. A handful of them did.
Did you know that the selfie stick was actually invented back in the 1980s? The concept didn't take off until Bluetooth-enabled smartphone cameras in recent years, but the concept has been around for decades now.
How have the designs of cameras changed over the past 100 years? The team over at eBay Deals wants to show you. They've created a series of animated GIFs showing how the cameras produced by major brands have evolved over the years as styles and technologies changed.
Photographer Ben Larsen purchased a lot on eBay that included several old rolls of film, one of which was a roll of Kodak Plus-X Pan black and white 35mm film. Not knowing anything about the roll, Larsen tossed it into a tank while processing his own roll of Kodak Tri-X at home. To his surprise, the film emerged from the developer with a large number of old photos of Seoul, South Korea, from five decades ago.