Photoshop 1.0 was first released as the Soviet Union was collapsing, but long before the software made photo manipulation easy, Kremlin censors went to extraordinary lengths to touch up history.
Often it is the backstory and the small stories behind a set of pictures that brings it all together. I posted the above picture back in 2011, photographed on film and included in a set of photos from an abandoned dye-works in Somerset, UK.
I ran across yet another case of Holy Cow Look At These Russian Photos, in which the photographs of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky were showcased. In 1902, Prokudin-Gorsky learned the method of shooting three negatives (color separations) and then projecting them in registration through filters to produce projected color images.
There's a new photo recovery technique that may help humanity recover some of the world's oldest photographs that were previously considered to be damaged beyond repair.
Decades before the word "selfie" exploded into popular culture, NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin shot the first space selfie while on a spacewalk during the Gemini 12 mission on November 12, 1966.
Kodak was once the 800-pound gorilla in the world of photography. But after a century of dominance, Kodak's business crumbled and it was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2012. If you'd like to better understand what happened to the iconic brand, watch this great 12-minute video by the popular YouTube channel Company Man.
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.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, chemists Robert Bunsen and Henry Roscoe and showed that burning magnesium produces artificial light that's similar to daylight. A man named Edward Sonstadt then brought the technology into the world of photography, and thus the idea for the photographic flash was born.
Did you know that before it became the most dominant photo editing program on Earth, Photoshop was first sold as "Barneyscan XP"?
Photographers often reminisce about the glory days of magazines, when they were given huge budgets, freedoms, and paychecks to create images. Here's one crazy example of what things were like then: People magazine once paid $10,000 for exclusive rights to a photo it didn't even want... just to keep it away from competitors.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?
Fossils can tell us a lot about the history of living things. Photographer Kent Krugh is creating a "fossil record" of sorts for cameras. His project Speciation is a series of X-ray photos of cameras that provides a brief history of photography, as told through the evolution of the camera.
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.
Back in 2010, Canon was challenged by German wildlife filmmaker Ivo Norenberg create an extreme, "impossible" lens. Canon accepted the challenge, and this 7-minute video is the fascinating story of how the $70,000 Canon CINE-SERVO 50-1000mm T5.0-8.9 EF-mount cinema lens came to be.
How's this for a lucky photo find: a 19th-century tintype photo purchased from eBay for just $10 has been identified as an extremely rare portrait of the infamous outlaw Jesse James... worth an estimated $2 million+.
She was Leningrad's lost photographer. Russian photographer Masha Ivashintsova (1942-2000) photographed constantly but never showed her work to anyone. In late 2017, a relative stumbled on boxes of negatives and undeveloped film gathering dust in an attic. Published here, some for the first time, are some of the 30,000 images from the remarkable discovery.
Filmmaker Andrew Saladino of The Royal Ocean Film Society made this 5-minute short film titled "The Life of a Camera." It tells the story of a Yamasheta 35mm film camera over decades of use, all through the eyes and photos of the camera.
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."
This is a story about a camera, a rather special camera. Every camera has a history, so they say. But it is not all that often that one has such a rich and documented history. One that was thought to be lost but has been found again. This is the story of Sean Flynn’s Leica M2.
Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to leave Earth's orbit, orbit the Moon, and return to Earth. Since it wasn't a moon landing, though, it tends to not be as celebrated as other manned moon missions. But the photo known as Earthrise was captured during this mission on December 24th, 1968, becoming an iconic piece of history. This 6-minute video from Vintage Space explores the question of who the person behind the camera was.
The word "selfie" exploded into the mainstream over the past 5 years, but self-portraits have obviously been around much, much longer. Sarah Burton of BuzzFeed recently set out to discover the origins of the selfie. In this 7-minute video, take a trip through the history back to the birth of the selfie.
Digital colorizations of historical photos have gotten quite a bit of attention in recent years. Retrographic is a new photo book that brings this concept to physical pages. It's a collection of some of the world's most well-known black-and-white historical photos transformed into living color.
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.
Instant Dreams is an upcoming documentary film about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Polaroid photo. Here's the 2-minute official trailer of this visually stunning film.
Want to know the origins of the concept of copyright? Here's a 25-minute video from Filmmaker IQ that looks at the history and philosophy behind modern-day copyright.
In the 1850s, photography became much more affordable and accessible for consumers. This sparked a trend in the Victorian era of postmortem photography, where dead loves ones featured among the pages of family albums. Here's a 2-minute video by the HISTORY channel about this creepy fad.
Here's a beautiful photo from over 100 years ago that shows two Native Americans looking at a strip of photographic film against the sky. It's a black-and-white photo that was colorized by colorization artist Jecinci.
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.
Did you know that there are only two known photos in existence that show the US Supreme Court in session? Cameras have long been banned inside the courtroom, so the only two photos were captured many decades ago by people who snuck cameras in.