Educational

Here's a little photographic history lesson to get your Thursday morning started off right. Did you know that the woman many sources believe was the first female photographer was an English botanist by the name of Anna Atkins? …

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are scientists by trade and artists at heart. They work as the leads of a Google research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are constantly on the lookout for interesting (and artistic) ways to visualize data.

Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject's face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman's face to look like it's constantly morphing.

Has someone ever asked you why you like an image? Beneath the surface of great picture, there is a geometric design in hiding. During World War II, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt worked for the early version of the Associated Press and went on to become a Life Magazine photographer, taking over fifty cover shots for them. Without getting too deep into Eisenstaedt’s personal story, I will say that he started photography with very little formal training.

With more entry-level DSLRs on the market now than ever, the camera manufacturers seem to understand that it's time to woo the beginners. Canon is doing it with a new DSLR simulator website, and now Sony has launched a helpful microsite of its own, focusing on video tutorials that'll get Sony α beginners off to a good start in the world of photography.

Greg Heisler is one of the great photographers of our time, and one of his strengths is meticulously planning his shots. Whether his subject is an NBA player or an olympian, Heisler's photos always capture the essence of that person, and his approach makes his BTS videos particularly educational and interesting to share.

Back in 2010, Adobe put out a short documentary called "Startup Memories -- The Beginning of Photoshop" to celebrate the program's 20-year anniversary by recalling its past. Somehow, that documentary slipped through our fingers at the time, but seeing as we've already started a conversation on how Photoshop is "remixing the world," we thought it was an opportune time to share this blast from the past.

Here's something you might want to read and bookmark for future reference. Photographer Robert Thomas has written up an in-depth article explaining what the different Photoshop blending modes are and how they actually work: …

Project Gutenberg is a digital library volunteer effort that takes old public domain and converts them into freely available eBooks for the benefit of the general public. Founded back in 1971, the library now has over 42,000 items in its collection.

If you're just starting out in photography, there are a lot of resources out there to help you understand the basics before you just jump in. And while books and videos are certainly helpful, one of the more fun ways to learn your way around a camera is by using an online DSLR simulator. We've shared one with you before, and now Canon Canada has released a simulator website of its own dubbed Outside of Auto.

If you're a photography enthusiast and ever have the good fortune of finding yourself floating around on the International Space Station, here are two words you should know: service module. Formally called the "Zvezda Service Module," it's the component of the ISS that houses all of the station's life support systems, and is where the astronauts gather if there is any kind of emergency. But here's the main reason you'll want to pay the module visit: the fancy camera equipment used by the …

Since NASA's first mission to the International Space Station back in 2000, astronauts on board the artificial satellite have snapped over 1.1 million photographs. What's neat is that every one of those photographs is available to the general public through a giant online database.

According to the Professional Aerial Photographers Association, the father of aerial photography was French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who photographed Paris from a hot air balloon way back in 1858. Unfortunately, none of his work remains today, and so the title of oldest surviving aerial photograph goes to the picture you see above.

In September 1933, LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt traveled to Geneva to document a meeting of the League of Nations. One of the political figures at the gathering was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitlers most devout underlings and a man who became known for his "homicidal anti-Semitism."

If you want a taste of how fast technology progresses in the world of digital photography, just look at the consumer camera industry through the lens of a company that continues to make a big splash: Apple.

Seeing as the Voyager-1 spacecraft has been in the news recently, here's the story of a very special photograph that it took 23 years ago known as "The Pale Blue Dot".

New cameras are like new computers. Both of them depreciate quite quickly as new technologies and new models are churned out year after year. This presents a perpetual problem for photographers, as many constantly grapple with the question of whether to upgrade their camera to a more recent model, or whether to purchase a higher-end model so that it keeps its value longer.

Photographer Brian Bowen Smith learned his craft at the feet of legendary shooter Herb Ritts; and now, many years and many star-studded photo shoots later, he's sharing some of his wisdom with the rest of us as part of Chicago Ideas Week.

From time to time I post plots of color gamuts like the one above. Each time, I get emails asking how I make them, leading me to assume that the world's thirst for color nerdiness is going unquenched. I'm setting out to fix that in this post.

Photographer Florian Knorn recently took a Fastcam SA4 high speed camera -- ordinarily used for observing things like ballistics and fluid dynamics -- and pointed it at a Sony HVL-F58AM flash unit, capturing what a camera flash firing looks like when captured at 500,000 frames per second and then slowed down to to 25fps.

Even before the digital age, National Geographic's photographers, on average, took about 1,933 photos for every one photo published. And it's this dedication to showing the world only the very best of what they manage to capture that makes these photographers some of the best in the world.

If you've been looking for a basic photography course online, here's something to hold you over until you find the right one for you. This "Photography (Basic)" course was put together by the U.S. Navy in 1993. And thanks to Reddit user clutch70706, you now have access to the full thing in PDF format.

This is a photo of Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh, captured in 1941 during the early years of World War II. It is said to be one of the most widely reproduced photos of all time.

William Eggleston didn’t invent color photography, but his landmark 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art gave it dignity, and began the four-decade process of acceptance by curators and collectors as an art form to rival oil painting.

Walker Evans' famous photo book "American Photographs" was first published in 1938. Since then, the book has been released in new editions every 25 years or so. Although the photos contained within its covers have remained the same, the processes and technologies used to print the photos have evolved over time, causing each edition to be every so slightly different from the others.

Entekaphobia is fear of the number 11. I’m a resolution fanatic. I test every new lens for resolution. For personal use, I’ll choose the lens with higher resolution over the one with creamy bokeh every time. When choosing a camera, I have a (yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true) strong tendency to want the most megapixels. I’m a resoholic.

It's not uncommon for digital cameras to have burst modes as fast as 10 frames per second these days -- especially in mirrorless and pellicle mirror cameras -- but do you think you have a good understanding of just how fast 10FPS is? If not, check out this video by YouTube user krnabrnydziobak, who pointed a Phantom Miro eX2 at a Nikon D4 to see what 10FPS looks like when captured at a staggering 1920FPS.

Did you know that the White House was completely gutted and rebuilt on the inside between 1949 and 1952? After decades of poor maintenance, the building was in danger of collapsing in 1948, which forced President Harry Truman to move out and commission a complete gutting and rebuilding of the building's insides.

Want to estimate proper exposures without a light meter and don't mind doing some simple arithmetic? Check out this wonderful Exposure Time Tables pocket reference that was published Zeiss Ikon.

Here's a fascinating video about the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which was preceded by one of the largest landslides in recorded history. Amateur photographer Keith Ronnholm had set up camp that day at Bear Meadows, roughly 10 miles northeast of the mountain.

When Fujifilm announced its latest wave of X-Series cameras earlier this year, the company stated that the big area they're focusing on is "speed". The new X20 and X100s feature extremely speedy autofocus, burst speed, and startup time. The 's' in X100s may officially stand for "speed," but it could just as well stand for "silent" or "stealth". Both cameras feature extremely silent shutters that won't attract attention while you're snapping away.

What do popping soap bubbles look like up close and slowed down? That's what Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys recently decided to find out. They used a pricey and powerful high-speed camera: the Phantom v1610, which costs upwards of $100,000 and can shoot up to 1,000,000 frames per second.

Want to buy all the camera equipment you need to start a photography business for just $15.35? All you'll need is... a time machine! Reddit user sneeden found this Sears Roebuck and Co. consumer guide for the fall of 1900. Two of the pages inside the catalog are for view camera kits that can help anyone "start in a pleasant and good paying business."

Here's a video that may be very interesting to you if you've never tried your hand at creating a tintype with wet plate collodion photography. Oklahoma City-based photographer Mark Zimmerman recently strapped a GoPro Hero 3 to his head and went through the entire process of creating a wet-plate photo on aluminum, from flowing the collodion in the beginning, through exposing it using his large format camera, and ending with a finished tintype photo of a camera.

In in 1946, the United States conducted a series of nuclear weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in what's known as Operation Crossroads. A total of two bombs were detonated to test the effects nuclear blasts had on naval warships. The second, named Baker, was the world's first nuke to be detonated underwater. Due to the unique properties of underwater explosions, the Baker test produced a number of unique photographs that the world had never seen before.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the results of a survey this week that sheds light on social media use among Americans. One of the networks they asked participants about was Instagram.

When people test cameras and lenses for resolution, they commonly use special resolution test charts that are filled with black bars of varying lengths and thicknesses. They're kind of like eye charts, except for cameras instead of eyeballs, and with lines instead of letters.

Did you know that 90% of the cells in (or on) the human body are bacteria and other microorganisms? Have you ever thought about how many bacteria live on your DSLR camera? Chicago Tribute staff photographer Alex Garcia recently dove into this second question while visiting the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago.

Jack over at the astrophotography blog The Landingfield has published a series of photographs showing what a digital camera's CMOS sensor looks like when viewed through a microscope. The sensor (seen above) was taken from a broken Nikon D2H -- a DSLR from back in the early 2000s.

In June of last year, we gave you a quick "photo trivia o' the day" lesson on the history of presidential photography. We told you that John Quincy Adams sat for what is currently the oldest surviving photo of a US President, that James Polk sat for the oldest of a US President in office, and that President Obama was actually the first to have his official photo taken digitally. That first of those three facts, however, comes with an interesting story.

As we wrote this past Monday, Chrysler scored a major advertising win during the Super Bowl with the commercial above, titled "Farmer." It's a simple photo slideshow with Paul Harvey's "So God Made a Farmer" speech playing in the background.

Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above.

On January 28, Nikon announced the 80th anniversary of the launch of the Nikkor lens brand, and that the total number of lenses manufactured since the beginning has exceeded 75 million units. The lineup now includes more than 80 types of lenses.

In late 2012, Photoshelter surveyed around 5,000 photographers to find out the industries outlook on 2013. Some of the findings were pretty interesting.

Eight years ago, it was discovered that some of the earliest daguerreotypes ever taken were fading away before our very eyes. Given the historical significance of these photographs, watching them deteriorate over time was unacceptable. So, in an attempt to save them, George Eastman House has enlisted the help of the University of Rochester.

Disappointed that the full-frame Sony RX1 compact camera doesn't come with an optical viewfinder? Don't worry: you can use the camera's hot shoe to attach a sweet/strange-looking universal turret viewfinder! That's how DSLR Magazine customized theirs in a recently published review.

Last week, we pointed you to a piece by the New York Times on how Fujifilm is attempting to kill moiré without killing sharpness by designing its sensors in a way that eschews the traditional anti-aliasing filters used in digital cameras. Photographer Martin Doppelbauer disagrees with Fuji's claims: he has published a piece arguing that, "digital cameras without aliasing filters are cameras with a built-in design flaw": …

It's ironic to the point of being tragic to think that one of the pioneers of digital camera technology was Kodak. Now bankrupt and licensing off their brand to mysterious companies, it's easy to forget that it was Kodak that hit many of the initial milestones where digital imaging is concerned.

The origin of photography was artistic incompetence. On his honeymoon in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to sketch the Italian countryside. He was assisted by a camera lucida, a device that projected the landscape onto a sheet of paper, but his untutored hand couldn’t follow the contours. So he conjured a means to record scenery chemically. He dubbed it “the art of photogenic drawing”, and in the 1840s popularized his invention with a book called The Pencil of Nature.

Fujifilm's new X-Trans sensors diverge from the traditional way CMOS sensors are designed by using an irregular pattern of red, green, and blue pixels. This allows the sensors to eschew the standard anti-aliasing filter, eliminating moiré patterns without putting an extra component in front of the sensor. Roy Furchgott over at The New York Times has an interesting piece on how the new tech is inspired by Fujifilm's glory days in the film photography industry: …