Educational

Want to see what it's like to photograph wild gorillas up close and personal? Check out the clip above from the 1974 documentary Gorilla by Dieter Plage. It shows Belgian photographer and conservationist Adrien Deschryver in heart of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in Zaire, snapping pictures of gorillas from a short distance away.

In dramatic scenes the tale of an abandoned baby is shown in heart-stopping detail. Brought into the forest by Deschryver to help it adjust to its natural habitat, it begins to scream when it hears other gorillas, and is subsequently snatched from him by the dominant silverback. Stunning photography captures the sheer force of the silverback’s intimidating demonstration before he grabs the youngster.

Deschryver demonstrates one of the things you learn in Photographing Gorillas 101: don't run when they charge.

Want to see what it looks like for a photo to go viral on Facebook? Check out these visualizations by San Francisco-based studio Stamen Design, which took three of the most shared images on the social networking service -- Marvin the Martian (visualized above), Famous Failures, and Ab Fab London, all shared by George Takei -- and created a visualization using the data from the hundreds of thousands of shares.

As President Obama’s four-year term in office comes to an end, TIME magazine caught up with his official photographer …

YouTube user uyt384 does tests on old camera lenses, but not in the way you'd expect. Instead of testing the build or image quality, he uses a Geiger counter to see how much radiation is being emitted by each one.

Have you ever wondered why computers always indicate that your hard drive or memory card has a smaller storage capacity than what's advertised on the box (and the card itself)? No, it's not because you got a defective card, it's not because your card came preloaded with a bunch of unwanted files (your hard drives, maybe), and it's not because the manufacturers are cheating you by skimping out on the storage space (well, not directly, at least). The reason has to do with math and marketing.

Here's a thought-provoking video making the rounds online -- one that you might want to watch if you love photography and have been thinking hard about your career path. It's based on a lecture given decades ago by philosopher Alan Watts, who poses the question, "What would you like to do if money were no object?"

Here's an interesting piece of photo trivia for today: did you know that Apple's similarities with Kodak don't end with Steve Jobs modeling his career and his company after Polaroid? The ongoing dispute between Apple and Samsung is strikingly similar to the battle Polaroid had with Kodak many decades ago.

Back in the summer of 1942, the US Army called upon a young man named Glenn W. Eve (above left) for World War II. After finding him to be 5'9'' and just 125 pounds, the military deemed him unfit for combat. Unlike Steve Rogers, there was no experimental serum available to Eve, but luckily he had a desired skill: photography. In 1944, Eve was promoted to private first class and placed in the Signal Photo Corps in order to document the happenings in the Pacific.

People sometimes use the expression "slow as a glacier" to describe something so stagnant that even the speeds of snails and molasses would feel inadequately fast in comparison. The fastest glaciers ever measured move at tens of meters per day, while the slowest ones may budge only have a meter over the course of a year. Most of the time, the movement is too slow for the human eye to see.

Luckily for us, there's something called time-lapse photography. Back in 2004, PBS aired a NOVA episode titled Descent into the Ice, which followed photographers and adventurers as they ventured deep into the heart of a glacier found on Mont Blanc. One of the things they did was set up cameras to capture the movement of glaciers over extremely long periods of time. The video above shows 5 months of movement seen under a glacier moving 2 feet per day.

New York magazine editor Christopher Bonanos has written a new book titled Instant: …

You might recognize the photograph above. Titled Valley Of The Shadow Of Death and snapped by British photographer Roger Fenton in 1855, it's considered to be one of the oldest known photographs of warfare. Problem is, it might also be one of the oldest known examples of a staged photograph.

Ever wonder what it looks like when you fire a gun underwater? Firearm enthusiast Andrew Tuohy of VuurwapenBlog recently decided to find out. Taking his .40 Glock 22 into his swimming pool, he captured some high speed videos of himself firing a round using an ordinary Pentax Optio WG-2 waterproof compact camera (which has a 120fps movie recording mode). The photograph above is a still taken from one of the videos.

Bankruptcy has not been friendly to Kodak. The once-important camera company — now a printing company — is worth …

Want to know what the professional photography industry was like over half a century ago, and what advice was commonly given to aspiring professionals? Check out this 10-minute vocational guidance film from 1946 that offers a quick overview of the various types of photography that people went pro in at the time. Suggested careers include portrait photography, commercial photography, and photojournalism.

What you're looking at is the most zoomed-in photo ever shot by mankind. Titled the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), it's a followup to the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo created in the mid-2000s. Scientists combined 10-years-worth of Hubble Space Telescope photos to create this resulting image that shows 5,500 individual galaxies, some of which are one ten-billionth the brightness of what our human eyes can see.

Check out this beastly camera used by Signal Corps during the Cold War. It featured a 100-inch infrared lens that was capable of seeing through over twenty miles of hazy air -- perfect for capturing reconnaissance photographs of enemy strongholds. The camera was so massive that it required two people to operate: one to frame the shot, and one to snap the photo.

Did you know that there's US currency on Mars? It's true: when NASA's Curiosity rover was launched back on November 26, 2011, one of the things it carried with it was a penny from over a century ago. The 1909 Lincoln cent is part of the rover's onboard calibration target used to check that the cameras are working properly.

The world's first color moving pictures have been discovered, dating back to 1902. The film sat forgotten in an old metal tin for 110 years before being found recently by Michael Harvey, the Curator of Cinematography at the National Media Museum in England. The pictures were part of a test reel of early color experiments by an Edwardian inventor named Edward Raymond Turner, and show Turners children, soldiers marching, domesticated birds, and even a girl on a swing set.

This photograph of Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide taking a self-portrait was published to NASA's amazing 2Explore Flickr account on Wednesday. It was snapped during a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The EXIF data embedded in the photo reveals that he was using a Nikon D2Xs with a 10.5mm fisheye lens at f/11, 1/500, and ISO 200.

In daguerreotype photography, the first commercially successful photographic process, a positive image is recorded directly onto a silvered copper plate. Although mercury is traditionally used to develop the plate, there's a way of creating daguerreotypes called the Becquerel method that eschews mercury in favor of non-lethal ingredients.

Did you know that in California, “rights of publicity” are transfered to a celebrity’s heirs after the celebrity dies? …

Photo printing company PhotoBox recently conducted a survey of 1,000 women aged 18-65 to find out how they feel about being in photographs. An interesting finding was that the women generally cared much more about how other women view the images than how men view them. Only 10% of women care about what men think of their photogenic-ness. Of the other 9 in 10 women, it's the 36-45 demographic that cares the most about being judged by other women.

If you think male and female photographers sometimes have very different styles, the reason might go beyond their tastes and approaches to shooting. Men and women see the world differently -- literally. A new study by vision researchers have found that the two genders have different ways of collecting visual information.

According to the findings, men are more sensitive to moving objects and seeing small details, while women tend to be sharper in seeing color changes.

Did you know that LCD screens and live view didn’t arrive until a number of years after digital cameras …

Ever wonder why Leica lenses cost so much? Among the many reasons are two big ones: the lenses are …

Try imagining a make-believe creature that has absolutely no basis in reality. Can you? Not really. The truth is, everything imaginary is simply a rehash of things that actually exist... just in a combination that doesn't exist. Aliens are simply strange combinations of humans and other creatures that we know. Unicorns are horses with horns. Bigfoot is some guy that accidentally spilled Rogaine all over his body.

This is the basis for writer Kirby Ferguson's big idea: that "everything is a remix." He created a popular four part video series on this topic over the past year, and recently he was invited by TED to give the condensed, sub-10-minute version of it that's shown above.

Hyperspectral cameras are those that can capture information in the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond what the human eye — …

If you've visited the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada anytime during the past five years at night, you've likely enjoyed the dazzling light show that appears on the side of the tower. The 1,330 uber-bright LED lights (which cost a cool $2.5 million) were installed in the elevator shafts back in 2007, and are turned on from dusk every day until 2 the next morning. What you might not have known, however, is that the seemingly random colors that appear are really not so random after all: they're actually pieces of photographs!

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 …