News › History Of Photography
Last week, Bokeh discussed a video from Getty Images about late photographer Carleton E. Watkins. While the video (seen below) is a year old and nothing new has arisen regarding Watkins, this does provide a good opportunity to discuss Watkins and his important contributions both to photography and to America's National Park System.
The good folks over at FStoppers published a new article by Alex Cooke yesterday that really grabbed our attention. Rather logically entitled "10 of the Weirdest Cameras Ever Made", the piece appealed to our love of photography, added a healthy splash of history and nostalgia, then neatly tied it off with a bow by...
It might be difficult to imagine, but photography was at one time a field occupied almost entirely by scientists. In the mid-19th century, one of these scientists, William Henry Fox Talbot, invented a process which would shape photography for well over a century, the negative-positive process.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Fox Talbot was not...
Have you ever noticed that people rarely smiled in old photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Vox discusses several theories for why this is in a newly-published video.
The first explanation as to why is that the exposure times were simply too long for people to be able to reliably hold a smile. It is much easier to maintain a...
The Cooperative of Photography (also known as COOPH) has published a new video overviewing the history of photography. In just five minutes, COOPH takes you through the history of photography from its camera obscura origins to the modern day digital camera.
Ancient philosophers Mozi, Aristotle, and Alhazen were the first to mention the camera...
John Hess from Filmmaker IQ has made an excellent video detailing the history and science of lenses and glass, and we think it's a "must-see" for our ethusiast gear-heads out there.
The origins of modern camera lenses can actually be traced back to the Nimrud Lens, whose intended purpose remains a mystery, which is...
Ansel Adams was a communicator who made no attempt to hide what was on his mind. But one photographer in particular drew out the worst in Adams, with him going so far as to refer to his contemporary as ‘the anti-Christ.’
This photographer was William Mortensen, an American fine art...
Professional photographer David Friedman recently uncovered some remarkable photos of New York City he took back in 2000. The intriguing digital photos were not taken with an early DSLR as you might expect, but rather his Game Boy Camera.
Charmingly low-res (we're guessing there are app developers already hard at work...
Think that your cloud backup, off-site hard copies, and RAID setup will keep your photo collection safe? Well, probably. But some folks go to more extreme measures to preserve their archives.
Underground, a 16-minute documentary by the Carnegie Museum of Art, takes a look at the Bettman Archive, owned by Corbis Images....
In what certainly qualifies as a treasure trove, the American Museum of Natural History has digitized its photo archive—dating back 145 years—and made it available to the public through its website.
The collection is made up of...
In 2014, we look back at an early digital cameras like the Kodak Hawkeye from the late 1980s as if it’s an antique, and a long-running lens standard like the Nikon F mount, launched in 1959, as a stalwart relic of an ancient past.
This newsreel clip produced by British Pathé in 1939 is as old as dirt by those...
Even full-frame monsters like the Nikon D4s or Canon 1D Mk IV look positively shrimpy next to the gear that sports photographers used to have to haul.
Gizmodo dug up a brief history of the “howitzer of early action photography,” based on a page at Kodakery. The weapon of choice for sporting...
In the Swinging Sixties, David Bailey was the most famous photographer in England. Young and cool, he partied with the Stones and the Beatles and was even known to hang out with gangsters like the notorious Kray Brothers. The main character in the 1966 Academy Award winning movie Blow-Up was in fact modeled after David...
Nearly 150 years ago, the English photographer Harry Pointer (1822-1889) had an epiphany. A portrait studio photographer in the resort city of Brighton, he realized that there was more to cats than meets the eyes – they could be photographed copycatting humans. This idea struck him one day in 1870 while photographing his...
"My ambition has always been to show the everyday city as if we were discovering it for the first time."
A superb new exhibition of photographs, Brassaï, Pour l’amour de Paris is on display at the Paris Mayor’s Office, the Hôtel de Ville. It is a reminder to all of us of the photographer who -- along with Henri...
It's hard to quantify the importance of photographer Lewis Hine's work in the United States. More than just an incredible artist, his work documenting child labor in the early days of the 20th century were instrumental in ending the practice. He spent much of his career...
"So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It's a tough job being a portrait photographer." -- Imogen Cunningham
In her long life, Imogen Cunningham was one of America's finest photographers and one of a...
His company's motto was "the hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty," and it lived up to the billing. A pioneer in aerial photography, George R. Lawrence captured stunning panoramic aerials of San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other great American cities. And he did it at time -- the turn of the century...
In six short, excellent videos from the George Eastman House -- each about three to six minutes long -- the history of film photography is told in terms of the processes behind it, from the Daguerreotype to gelatin silver prints. The Eastman House staff, led by Alison Nordstrom, senior curator of photographs, takes us...
"Hurley is a warrior with his camera, and would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture."
-- Lionel Greenstreet, First Officer of the Expedition Ship Endurance.
"Mad" Frank Hurley was a photographer who by any measure was bigger than life. Compared to him, Mad Max was just an out-of-work traffic cop in a bad...