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.
On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that sparked huge fires, destroying over 80% of the city and killing roughly 3,000 people. Immediately before and after the earthquake, cameras captured dashcam-style footage while traveling down Market Street, and those films now provide an idea of how SF was changed through the quake.
In 1975, a 24-year-old engineer named Steven Sasson invented digital photography while working at Eastman Kodak by creating the world's first digital camera. Kodak wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the industry-changing breakthrough.
Here's a helpful graphic that shows how Leica Camera's famous red circle logo has changed and evolved over the past century, from its creation around 1913 up to the modern day.
Back in March 1843, the sixth US president (serving from 1825–1829), John Quincy Adams, sat for a portrait photo in a Washington studio. Fast forward to the modern day, and the photo is now the oldest surviving photo of a U.S. president. It's going to auction and carries an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000.
Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910 in the German state of Stuttgart to a middle-class Jewish Galician family. She attended a Swiss boarding school, where she learned English and French and grew up receiving a secular education. In spite of her bourgeois origins, she became part of socialist and labor movements while still very young.
The past few hours of digging up and scanning my old files of MLB baseball star Darren Daulton have only made the pit in my stomach tighter. Sometimes looking through old pictures after someone’s passing is cathartic, but not now.
For those in North America, the solar eclipse on August 21st, 2017, could be the most photographed, viewed, and observed eclipse of all time. But back in 1851, cameras were in short supply, and that was the year the very first photograph was taken of a solar eclipse.
The visual record left behind by the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers has, according to New York Times critic Charles Hagen, come to “represent one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to depict a society in photographs (Hagen, 1985).”
Here's an interesting piece of trivia: did you know that flash memory is named after the camera flash?
"Camera obscura" refers to a device for viewing an image that makes use of the principles of pinhole imagery, and is usually made with a box of sorts. It's this that was eventually turned into the first pinhole camera - and now you can make your own!
Wedding photos from the late 1800s have a slightly different aura about them... and we're not talking about the sepia tone, either. There's often no smiling or touching -- completely emotionless images of people on their special day were commonplace.
My wife Sara and I used to have this running joke leading up to her birthday each year. Each year I’d say, “Honey! What would you like for your birthday?,” and she would reply “I’d like a Hasselblad”. Usually with a big smile on her face, in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of way.
Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” is one of the most famous photographs ever taken. But who was the woman featured in the portrait? This 7-minute video from Today I Found Out delves in to the complete story behind the image.
Europeana.eu has launched a searchable online gallery of more than 2 million historical photographs, which catalog the first 100 years of photography in Europe.
Taken in September of 1942, this captivating collection of black and white photographs show the New York Times in production during the height of World War II.
Before you read the rest of the article, and it will be a long read, please allow me to share a few thoughts with you. Visiting the abandoned city of Pripyat and the disaster site of Chernobyl was an experience that I was looking forward to for a very long time.
Have you ever wondered what World War II was like? Last month I got a little closer.
Due to costs and scarcity, the vast majority of photos captured during World War II were shot on black-and-white film. Some images were captured in color, however, and those rare shots reveal what scenes from the Second World War looked like to people in them.
The Canon EOS (Electro-Optical System) ecosystem was born 30 years ago with the introduction of the Canon EOS 650 35mm SLR on March 2nd, 1987. Since then, over 70 EOS cameras have been launched. Here's a 1.5-minute video by Digital Camera Warehouse that shows the evolution of EOS cameras over three decades.
Aspiring filmmaker Vugar Efendi has created a fascinating video for history and film buffs alike. In it, he places famous movie clips right next to the historical news reels and TV clips that inspired them, showing us just how incredibly accurate some of Hollywood's period pieces really are.
Back in 2009, someone had the bright idea of doing an iconic photo shoot showing Air Force One flying low over New York City. The airplane triggered panic among New Yorkers who thought it was another 9/11-style terrorist attack, causing people to evacuate buildings and run for their lives.
This is really cool. It turns out you can browse through full issues of the old Soviet Photo (AKA "Советское фото") magazine online at Archive.org. Fans of photography history will love this treasure trove, which contains 437 digitized issues originally published between 1926 and 1991.
This is the story behind the world's first wide-angle, head-on photographs of a fighter jet. In the video above, photographer Richard Cooke explains how he captured this incredible photograph remotely, on film, essentially shooting blind, back in 1977.
Snapchat is known for popularizing the idea of the self-destructing photo, but did you know that long before Snapchat existed, Polaroid had already offered its own line of self-destructing Polaroid pictures? It was called the Fade to Black line.
Need to add some fake blood to your photo shoot? Instead of going the digital route, you can easily whip up some realistic fake blood using recipes developed for Hollywood movies. The 2-minute video above is a quick look at some of the fake blood recipes that were used over the past decades.
In the annals of photography, few people have made the kind of impact that Oskar Barnack can claim. While working for Leitz, then a microscope manufacturer, the master entineer and photography enthusiast invented the original Ur-Leica: a camera that would change the world.
Back in 1984, Minolta launched a camera called the Minolta AF-S V. Marketed in the United States as the "Minolta Talker," the camera would actually speak to the photographer using it.
I often frequent my local Goodwill at least once a week. I'm usually partial to picking up vinyl, vintage sweaters, cameras, typewriters, and books. Somehow this week was different.
On July 25th, 2017, Nikon will celebrate its centennial anniversary—100 years of Nikon. And in case you didn't know that, they've released an almost comically epic video announcing this fact and tracing some of Nikon's highlights throughout history.