mystery

Destin Sandlin of SmarterEveryDay was out shooting the recent Super Blue Blood moon when something weird happened. As soon as the moon "touched" the tip of a model of the Saturn 5 rocket in Alabama, USA, a dark line appeared in his photos.

Here's a strange story that shows the power of Internet crowdsourcing in doing unusual reverse image searches. It all started with a blurry, seemingly questionable photo seen on a smartphone in the hands of a politician in the UK Parliament.

It's all over Internet by now: the baffling picture of 'red' Strawberries, and the claim it does not contain any 'red' pixel.

This 1-minute video was captured by a road-tripping group of friends who stuck a GoPro out a car window while driving down a road in Vermont. It's also a video that accidentally captures how one of the kids lost his dad's $1,000 DSLR.

A lot of people have asked us why we only shoot “Victoria’s back” and why we rarely ever show her face. Believe it or not, we actually have a reason why we shoot a lot of faceless imagery, and we wanted to write it down, once and for all, so you can reference it any time you want.

One of the big photo stories on the Web this past week has been the picture above, shot over the weekend by Australian photographer Sam Yeldham. Yeldham was shooting time-lapse photos of a storm rolling into Sydney when a bride and groom strolled into the scene. He captured a gorgeous shot of the couple as the sun was setting and before the storm struck, but the couple was gone before he could get their contact information.

Amazon has a rather unusual Lightning Deal going on right now for Prime Day. The company is offering a "Mystery Digital Camera" bundle for 43% off the regular price. The $500 camera is being sold with a case and 16GB memory card for $419.

Carl Zeiss today uploaded a number of sample photos captured with its new Batis line of full frame lenses for Sony's FE mount. Of the 7 images taken with the 85mm f/1.8 and the 4 with the 25mm f/2, one in particular is causing quite a bit of discussion among Sony shooters.

Today, Chris Pratt is a superstar actor whose credits include the summer blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy, but when he was 20 he was just a kid living out of his car in LA who wanted to make it as an actor -- a goal he might never have achieved if it hadn't been for a generous mystery photographer in West Hollywood who took his headshots for free.

For the past thirteen years, Elizabeth Keefe has sought to find the mystery couple in a wedding photograph she happened upon.

The photograph, which depicts a smiling bride and groom with four of their wedding guests, was given to Keefe by a friend who had found it at Ground Zero weeks after the 9/11 attack.

Since the early 20th century, people have been studying and theorizing how some rather heavy rocks in Death Valley called 'Sailing Stones' somehow glide across the dry, desert floor of what is often the hottest location in the United States.

And while a number of feasible theories had come to light, it's only recently that one of these theories was proven thanks to a dedicated time-lapse camera setup.

Gizmodo writer Attila Nagy was browsing through the Boston Public Library's Flickr stream recently when the above photograph by Leslie Jones caught his eye. He noticed that the scene in the background looked strangely similar to another, much more iconic, photo: "Night View, New York" by Berenice Abbott.

That got him wondering: could the figure seen in the foreground of the photograph actually be Berenice Abbott on the night she made her famous image?

Time-lapse videos are all the rage these days, but the one above is unlike any that have ever been made. It shows an ancient Egyptian statue spinning around in a glass on its own.

More than 75 years ago, aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared not far from the completion of her record-breaking attempt to circumnavigate the Earth at the equator. The wreckage of her plane was never found, and many believe that what's left of that wreckage is still somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Another theory, however, is that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on the reef surrounding the yet uninhabited island known as Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). And some recently found aerial negatives of that island might hold to key to proving this theory right.

New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue knows something we don’t. In this …

Photographer Stephen Oachs over at Aperture Academy caused quite a stir yesterday after sharing some photographs he took of a Japanese photographer he spotted in Kenya. The photographer revealed that he was field testing a new Canon 200-400mm with a built-in teleconverter, but what caught Oachs attention was the camera body the man was using -- a Canon DSLR that he didn't recognize. He writes,

You can see it in the photos I took... I see the "Q" button located by the big wheel on the right, which on the 7D is currently located on the top left. The battery grip seems to have a joystick. I also noticed a "Rate" button...hrm, any ideas?

Is this the new 5D Mark III, or maybe the 7D Mark II? This info I was not able to determine.

Canon sent out this teaser yesterday stating that it’s going to be making some kind of game-changing announcement on …

In 1505, Leonardo da Vinci painted a vast mural in Florence's town hall titled "The Battle of Anghiari" -- believed to be one of his greatest works. After being on display for more than 40 years, the unfinished painting was lost when the hall underwent renovations and new murals by Giorgio Vasari were added. There are no known records explaining what happened to the piece, but many people believe that it is currently hidden behind one particular mural called "Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana".

Photographer David Yoder began photographing this mystery for the National Geographic starting in 2007, and soon began looking for a way to photograph the lost painting through the existing mural. He's currently attempting to raise $266,500 through Kickstarter to develop a camera to do this.

Ordinarily if there’s movement in a timelapse video, it’s constrained to a small area because a dolly or crane …

If you're not convinced that Google is jumping into the photo-sharing pool head first, get this: the company has not one, but two stealthy photo sharing apps in private beta. Besides the Pool Party app that came to light at the beginning of the month, the rumored Photovine service has now materialized into a website -- well, a landing page, at least.

Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.

We've heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera "skeleton" with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was surprised to discover 104 photographs taken within a 2 week period in June 2007.

There's an old beat up Leica MP-36 being sold by a reputable seller on eBay (8533 feedback score with 99.4% positive) for the staggering price of $104,000. What's strange is that the details provided in the listing are quite sparse. The page includes a few photographs and the description,

In 1877, photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a longstanding debate on whether or not a horse completely leaves the ground at any point during its gallop by taking a single photograph of a horse completely airborne. In the same way, photography was also used recently by a group of researchers to uncover the mystery of how cats drink.

The mysterious white camera -- most likely the NX100 -- that was seen in a leaked photograph from a commercial shoot recently has apparently been spotted again, this time in a National Geographic/Samsung advertisement posted to YouTube.

The mystery of the Ansel Adams garage sale negatives keeps taking on new twists, but the latest twist might have solved it once and for all.

KTVU in Oakland is reporting that a Bay Area woman named Mariam l. Walton has come forward with apparently solid proof that the photographs were not taken by Ansel Adams but her Uncle Earl. She was watching KTVU report on the story Tuesday when she suddenly saw a photograph of the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinal Dome and recognized it as a print her uncle Earl Brooks made back in 1923.