historical

The following is a collection of some of the earliest known images of people smiling, starting with a pair of soldiers in the Mexican American War in 1847 and up to a group of soldiers near the end of the Civil War.

If early images of people smiling do not come as a surprise to you, there are a few things to note. Among other things, a portrait of a person with a grin of any kind is quite a rare find in the early decades of photography.

Did you know that a single unknown photographer helped change the course of history for Yosemite with his photos back in 1861? The video above tells the story of Carleton Watkins, a man whose photos of Yosemite made their way to President Abraham Lincoln and helped influence the decision to turn the area into a National Park.

The photograph above has been called the most famous tabloid photo of the 1920s. It's the first photo showing an execution by electric chair, and was captured by photographer Tom Howard at the execution of Ruth Snyder back on January 12, 1928.

Hyperlapses, or timelapses with the camera traveling great distances, have become all the rage these days, but have you ever wondered how far back the technique goes? The short film above, titled "Pacer," was captured back in 1995 using a Bolex 16mm film camera. It is being called the world's oldest hyperlapse.

The first ceremonial first pitch ever thrown was tossed by former Japanese Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu at a baseball game in Koshien, Japan, back in 1908. Two years later, US President William Howard Taft started the tradition in the United States, tossing a pitch (shown above) in Washington DC on the opening day of the Washington Senators' season. Since then, every US president has thrown at least one ceremonial first pitch, and they have all been documented in photographs.

Here's a look at some historical photos of US presidents throwing their ceremonial pitches.

Here’s a colorized 1912 photograph of freelance photographers Bill and Joseph James riding a motorcycle in Toronto. Their father …

Want to see how much our ability to photograph space has improved over the past 135 years or so? …

A 87-year-old grandmother in Texas has sold a rare and valuable collection of more than 500 Civil War-era photographs to the Library of Congress after building her personal collection for four decades.

As New York City prepares to digitize and publish thousands of historical crime scene photos captured by photo unit police officers, here's a look at the subject from the photojournalist's point of view.

The 9-minute above is an interview with Weegee, a photographer known for his gritty black-and-white photos of crime scenes and urban life. It's from the 1958 vinyl record "Famous Photographers Tell How."

The photographer known as Weegee made his mark on photography by hunting for crime scenes and uncomfortable shots in New York City. We may soon be seeing some of the crime scenes he captured from an alternate perspective.

Thousands of historical crime scene photographs shot by the New York Police Department will soon be digitized and released for the public to see.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is a French photography pioneer who is credited with capturing the oldest surviving photograph of a real world scene, a print made back in 1825. In addition to that famous image, titled View from the Window at Le Gras, Niépce also created a number of other photos that are recognized as being some of the earliest photos ever made.

Dana Keller has made a name for himself as a talented photo colorizer, using his Photoshop skills to offer an idea of what historical black-and-white photos might have looked like had the photographer been able to shoot in color. The video above is a 6-minute look at how Keller approaches the task of colorization.

Want to start your own camera museum? There's a new listing on eBay that can put you on the fast track to doing so. It's for a gigantic collection of roughly 600 vintage cameras from between 1880 and 1980. The description claims the lot could be turned into one of the largest camera museums in the world.

Here's a collection of camera commercials that have appeared over the past 20 years. No matter your age, there’s probably something here that you’ll remember, and I hope it will bring back a bit of nostalgia. I've also selected what I consider the best commercial of them all.

As a tribute to Photoshop for its recent 25th birthday, Lynda …

Here's a photograph of Jessie Tarbox Beals, America's first female photojournalist, with her camera on a street a century ago. While most female photographers of her time shot photos from the peace and safety of photo studios, Beals ventured into the world of photojournalism and made a name for herself through her tenacity, self-promotion, and freelance news photos.

Back in 1887, a photography instructor named Edward M. Estabrooke published a book titled Photography in the Studio and in the Field. It was "a practical manual designed as a companion alike to the professional and the amateur photographer."

Filled with detailed information on how to practice photography with the equipment and technologies of the time, the book also contains interesting passages that describe how the world of photography was changing.

Want to see what it's like to flip through the first photo book that ever appeared in the world? The online show Objectivity recently paid a visit to The Royal Society in London to see its copy of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a 1843 book by English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins that's considered to be the first book ever to be illustrated exclusively with photographs.

Here's a fascinating video about how photographer Michael Paul Smith creates and photographs Elgin Park, a 20th century town created through miniature 1/24th-scale models. Smith creates incredibly realistic photos by capturing the detailed dioramas with an ordinary compact camera, and his images have gone viral in recent years on the Internet (the project has over 70 million views on Flickr).

Photographer Levi Bettweiser is the man behind the Rescued Film Project, an effort to find and rescue old and undeveloped rolls of film from the far corners of the world.

He recently came across one of his biggest finds so far: 31 undeveloped rolls of film shot by a single soldier during World War II.

Before Canon and Nikon became juggernauts in the world of DSLRs, Kodak actually created one of the first DSLRs by modifying the Nikon Pronea 6i film SLR. Called the Kodak DCS315, the camera was the world's first DSLR to feature an image preview LCD and JPEG processing in the camera itself. It was launched in 1998 and boasted an amazing (at the time) 1.5 megapixels.

"Seven Generations of American Women" is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Christine McConnell in which she recreated her family portraits going back 200 years. The series starts with her great-great-great-grandmother and ends in the present day.

Joel Snow was visiting a flea market in Colorado this past October when he came across a box with several packets of old negatives at the bottom. After digitizing them, Snow realized that it was a fascinating collection of old photos from the early part of the 20th century.

Back in 2012, the George Eastman House released a series of six videos showing six photo processes used in the history of photography. This month, the museum re-released those six videos alongside six new ones. It's a video series that now spans 12 videos showing major processes spanning from the Daguerreotype all the way up through digital photography.

German news broadcaster Deutsche Welle created this short feature on the history of Leica in light of the 100th …

Noted Nigerian photographer Chief S.O. Alonge was the very first indigenous photographer of the Royal Court of Benin in Nigeria, and for some five decades, he captured thousands of Kodak glass-plate negatives of the ritual, pageantry and regalia of the Nigerian obas (kings), their wives and retainers.

Now, these rarely seen images and the fascinating world they preserved are being pulled out of the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and shown to the world once more.

A photographer's notebook from over a century ago has been discovered in Antarctica. It belonged to British explorer and photographer George Murray Levick, who was part of Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition to the continent from 1910 to 1913.

Last week we shared an example of beauty retouching that was done by hand in the early 1900s. If you're wondering how this type of retouching was done, check out the contraption above.

It's called the Adams Retouching Machine, and was created to aid negative retouchers in doing manual edits more quickly and cleanly.

Want to see an early example of beauty retouching in photography? Here's one. The side-by-side images above from the early 1930s show what a glamour portrait looked like before and after manual 'Photoshopping.'

Did you know that after National Geographic published its first wildlife photographs in July 1906, two of the National Geographic Society board members "resigned in disgust"? They argued that the reputable magazine was "turning into a 'picture book'".

Luckily for us, it did turn out to become quite a picture book. Those first wildlife photos published in the magazine were captured by George Shiras, III, and marked quite a few "firsts."