Recognize this photograph? It shows 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screaming and kneeling over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, shot during the Kent State Massacre. Kent State photojournalism student John Paul Filo -- just 22-years-old at the time -- captured the image, and was later awarded the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography.
Earlier this month, when we were exploring why the NASA Curiosity rover's cameras are so lame, we mentioned that the total amount of data the scientists can transfer on a daily basis is only around 31 megabytes. As anyone with a restrictive cell phone dataplan can attest to, having a small data cap makes you think carefully about the data that you choose to download.
XKCD recently published this humorous comic explaining how you should interpret star ratings online. These are the ratings you come across when browsing online stores (e.g. Amazon) and customer review websites -- ratings that supposedly provide an accurate glimpse at how consumers feel about the product. Do they, though? …
If the photograph was a living person, what would his Facebook timeline look like? Photo aggregation service Pixable decided to answer this question, creating a giant infographic on the history of the photograph with the layout of a Facebook timeline. It all starts at the very bottom of the timeline, with the photograph's birth at around 1000 AD. Over the years, we see the marriage he has with Kodak, the Kodachrome process born to the couple a few decades later, and a subsequent relationship …
Stamps, coins, comic books, and baseball cards. Those are some of the popular things people around the world collect as a hobby. Not Ying Nga (Cecilia) Chow. She collects unprocessed photographic camera film.
Neil Armstrong passed away this past Saturday at the age of 82. In addition to being the first man to walk on the moon, he was also the first photographer to set foot on that hunk of rock 238,900 miles away. Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin snapped a total of 122 70mm color photographs using modified Hasselblad 500EL cameras during their short visit on July 21, 1969. However, not all of them were pretty.
A Leica camera from 1923 became the world's most expensive camera earlier this year when it was auctioned for a staggering $2.79 million. The world's most expensive lens has a similar price tag... and is also a Leica.
Planetary conjunctions are beautiful to photograph from Earth, but send a camera to another planet in the Solar System, and you can shoot a planetary conjunction photograph containing Earth! …
Men at Lunch is an amazing new documentary film by Seán Ó Cualáin that explores the story of one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century: Lunch atop a Skyscraper. the 1932 photo of eleven construction workers taking a lunch break while sitting on a girder suspended 850 feet above New York City.
American portrait photographer Gregory Heisler (whom we featured yesterday) is probably best known for his 70+ cover portrait photos for TIME magazine. One of his most famous portraits shows a double exposure, "two faced" photo of President George H.W. Bush. The photograph, shot entirely in-camera, was used as the first TIME "Person of the Year" cover photo.
On of the neat things about working at Google is the fact that the company loves letting its employees hear from the world's best minds through the AtGoogleTalks. Through the series of lectures, Google invites well-known individuals to share on their area of expertise for 40-70 minutes. In addition to the thousands of politicians, musicians, and entertainers who have shared so far, there have also been a number of photographers invited for Photographers@Google presentations.
If you have a free 20 minutes, here's a great 1958 documentary on the life and work of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Created while Adams was living at a house near the Golden Gate Bridge, the film provides a look into his home, interests, attitudes toward art, camera equipment, and photographic techniques.
San Francisco-based photographer Lisa Kristine has spent the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world. More recently, she has been working with the organization Free the Slaves, using her photography to document the monstrosity that is modern day slavery.
Recognize the warning message above? It's what Windows XP would show whenever you tried to rotate a JPEG image 90° using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. If you're like me, you probably didn't think twice about it (and checked the checkbox), since you had done it many times already and hadn't noticed any difference in quality. After all, how hard can it be to turn a digital photo sideways? You just move the pixels around right? …
You know the infinitely long tunnel that appears when you look into two mirrors that are pointed at one another? Have you ever noticed that the tunnel becomes more and more green, the deeper you go?
The man in the moon and the face on mars. These are both the result of a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, which involves the brain trying to perceive random signals as significant. It's one of the brain's face detection mechanisms, and causes us to see faces where they don't actually exist -- the Virgin Mary's face on toast, for example.
Ever since NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars and started beaming back photographs earlier this week, people have been wondering, "why are the photos so bad?" The criticism seems merited: consumers these days are snapping great high-res photographs using phones that cost just hundreds of dollars, yet NASA can't choose a camera with more than 2-megapixels of resolution for their $2.5 billion mission? …
A couple years ago we reported on the amazing fact that chickens have image stabilized heads, and shared some interesting "research" into using chickens as camera stabilizers. It turns out birds aren't the only creatures with IS systems built into their hardware: cats have it too!
NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars this morning with much fanfare here on Earth. The photo above is one of the first photographs snapped by the rover and beamed back to Earth. Captured through a fisheye wide-angle lens, the landscape photo hows a gravel field in the foreground and the rim of the Gale Crater (the rover's new home) in the distance.
George Eastman House just finished its 6 part video series on photographic processes used throughout history. The short educational videos run about 3-6 minutes each, and provide a great look into the various ways photographers of old created their images.
Ever wonder what the most viewed photograph of all time is? One leading candidate is Bliss, the photograph chosen by Microsoft to be the default wallpaper of Windows XP. Showing rolling green hills in Sonoma County, California, the image was shot by the side of a highway by professional photographer Charles O'Rear using a medium format camera. It has reportedly been viewed by over 1 billion people since it first emerged in 2002.
There's a reason that most of the foods you buy never look like the photos used to advertise them. Food photographers and stylists have all kinds of random tricks up their sleeve for making food items look picture perfect. Here's a list of various household products that are commonly used to make dishes look more appealing. A warning, though: you might lose your appetite.
What would photographs of the night sky look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the Moon? This beautiful video by 3kingAmazing (remixed using a video by Brad Goodspeed) shows the answer.
The Olympic games in London this year makes London the first city to have hosted the modern Olympic Games three times. The previous times were in 1908 and 1948. Here are some photographs captured at the 1908 Olympics 104 years ago, during a time when megaphones were used to announce events, top hats were all the rage, and dresses were worn by female competitors (this was the third games in which women were allowed to compete).
This fascinating TED talk was given last month by MIT researcher Ramesh Raskar on his femto-photography camera that snaps images at a whopping one trillion frames per second -- a rate so fast that it can capture light in motion. The technology may one day be used to build cameras that shoot around corners or see into the human body without X-rays.
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Landsat, the longest-running program focused on acquiring satellite photos of Earth. The Landsat satellite snaps one completely photo of the Earth's surface every 16 days, and the petabytes of photos collected over the years have given scientists a view into how our planet's surface has changed over time, whether by natural or human-caused means. Google is currently working to make the photos easily enjoyable by the general public by transforming them …
The Dirkon pinhole 35mm camera is made entirely from paper cut from a template by designers Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolář and Richard Vyškovský. The three published the template in a 1979 issue of Czechoslovakian magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců (translated as An ABC of Young Technicians and Natural Scientists). While original prints of the magazine are rare, the Dirkon gained cult popularity in Chzechoslovakia.
There's always been a general consensus that there is an actual reason behind the "No Flash Photography" signs we see plastered all over the place. In some places it makes sense -- not flashing photosensitive animals at the aquarium speaks for itself -- but what about art galleries and museums? Why exactly do we have to rely on natural light there? According to Steve Meltzer on Imaging Resource, no good reason at all.
Did you know that Atari was once in the "photo" making business? In 1975 -- 3 years after it's founding -- the young video game company launched the Compugraph Foto, a large coin-operated machine that snapped photos and printed them out as ASCII portraits. Subjects stood in front of a monitor showing their face and then pressed a series of buttons, triggering the 950-pound machine to print out the portrait as a 14x11-inch "photo" on computer paper.
Have you ever learned that you should autofocus on the same point twice in a row to achieve optimal focusing? Apparently it's a tip that's often taught to beginners.
This behind-the-scenes video by the Associated Press gives a neat look at the various robotic cameras the agency will use at the London Olympic Games (earlier this month we shared some of Reuters' rigs). Fancy remote-controlled rigs will allow for many photographic firsts, as cameras will be found in locations that were previously inaccessible. Wired writes that despite their usefulness, robotic cameras are causing some human photogs to sweat: …
"Photography" was featured as a category on last night's episode of Jeopardy. Here are the 5 questions that were asked. If you consider yourself a photography buff, see if you can answer all of them (answers at the end).
Vivian Maier, Photographer is a beautiful short film about the life and work of Vivian Maier, the unknown amateur photographer whose massive collection of street photographs was discovered at an estate sale after her death.
The Sartorialist might be a big name in street fashion photography these days, but snapping impromptu photos of the latest clothing trends is nothing new. Over a century ago, a photographer named Edward Linley Sambourne did the same kind of photography on the streets of London and Paris using a concealed camera. His images form a beautiful historical record of what people wore that deviates from what people typically think of when they hear "Edwardian fashion".
Why My Photographs Are Bad is a photography book for beginners first published in 1902 by a man named Charles Maus Taylor. The book contains many of the same basic tips that can be found in introductory books these days, but also many that are very specific to the way photography was done at the time. Here's a selection of common mistakes that newbie photographers were making over 100 years ago.
A week ago, a short TED talk by Duncan Davidson called "Why do we hate seeing photos of ourselves" went viral in the blogosphere. While I agree with Duncan's main premise that part of the issue is that we are used to seeing a mirror image of ourselves, I think it goes deeper.
There's an abandoned McDonalds in California that's stuffed with 48,000 pounds of 70mm tape. These tapes contain never-before-seen ultra-high-res photographs of the moon shot by the Lunar Orbiter project 40 years ago. Rather than ship the film back to Earth, scientists decided to scan them on the spaceship, beam them back losslessly, and then record the data onto magnetic tape. Not wanting to reveal the precision of its spy satellites, the US government decided to mark the images as classified.
Check out this blast from the past: it's a 1986 commercial for the Minolta Maxxum 7000.
Randall Munroe over at XKCD posted this fascinating comic today that demonstrates some of the peculiarities of human vision. Roll up a piece of paper to set your eyes the correct distance from the screen, and then observe how they perceive things like detail, color, polarization, and more. Click the image above for the large version.
Back in 2010, we shared a video showing Canon's 1200mm lens -- a giant piece of glass that has been called "The Mother of All Telephotos". If you thought that focal length was long, check out Nikon's 1200-1700mm f/5.6-8P lens. Nikon launched a prototype of the lens in 1990 for newspaper photographers covering baseball in Japan. The sample photos above show the lens' ridiculous reach. A standard 50mm FoV can be seen on the left, while the right photo shows what the same scene looks like at …
What you see here is the first image ever uploaded to the World Wide Web. It's a graphic featuring a promo shot for comedy band Les Horribles Cernettes, and was uploaded almost exactly 20 years ago by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Motherboard has the interesting story behind the photo: …
Vince Devlin over at the University of Montana has the fascinating story of how four UM photojournalism students snagged the first photos of Ted Kaczynski (AKA the "Unabomber") back in 1996, beating other media organizations and making the cover of Newsweek: …
Here's a promotional/educational video by Canon that explains both how digital cameras work and how it manufactures them. Interesting fact: lenses are so precise that if they were to be enlarged to the size of a sports stadium, the margin of error would be less than the thickness of a business card.
In this B&H Event Space seminar, David Brommer takes you "Beyond The Rule of Thirds" by discussing many different aspects of photographic composition. The entire seminar will take about two hours to watch from start to finish, but the information Brommer covers -- from positive and negative space, to theories of color and balance and other advanced composition -- is highly informative for amateurs, and may even benefit some pros.
Needing a way to test the speed of memory cards, Jaroslav of Crazy Lab realized that camera shutter sounds can do the trick. By recording the sound of his Canon 600D snapping away in continuous burst mode and then viewing them audio file, he was able to visualize the card's speed and compare them against each other. He also learned some things about burst speed and ISO/format: …
"Science can be beautiful. Art can be scientific." This latest episode of the PBS series Off Book, titled "Seeing Beyond the Human Eye", looks into how science and photographic techniques are helping transform how we see the world.
Ever wonder how much you're paying to keep your rechargeable camera batteries juiced? The answer: probably around a buck or two a year. Researcher Baskar Vairmohan of EPRI conducted a study to determine the effect of popular gadgets on our nation's power grid, calculating the annual electricity costs of various devices. He found that an iPhone uses $0.25, an iPad uses $1.36, a 60-watt light bulb uses $1.61, a laptop uses $8.31, a desktop uses $28.21, and a fridge uses $65.72. Camera batteries …
In both still photography and video, camera work should generally be invisible to viewers, allowing them to focus on the subject being captured. The same is true for video games. Here's a nerdy yet fascinating analysis of the camera in the legendary SNES game, Super Mario World. It's so simple, yet so well designed that it's not something you've probably ever thought about.
After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your iOS devices probably noticed that your browsers failed "the test". The reason? Color management is strangely absent from iOS. Software engineer Jeffrey Friedl, who discovered this fact a few months ago, writes, …
Here's an interesting graphic that's floating around the social networks (anyone know the source?) that shows why photography is more expensive than some people think it should be ("it's just pointing and snapping, right?"). If you like this, then check out our post back in January titled, "Why Wedding Photographers' Prices Are 'Wack'".
