Historical

Since 2008, The Impossible Project has kept the Polaroid flame alive with their line of instant films. Today, in the Apple app store, they've released version 1.2 of an iPhone app designed to integrate mobile photography with analog instant film. The features allow for instant digitization and photo sharing for your Polaroid prints as well as a way of making Polaroid prints from iPhone captures with their soon-to-be-released Instant Lab.

"40 years ago [William Eggleston] dragged color, kicking and screaming, into the world of art photography." In this fascinating documentary from BBC's Imagine, we get a small glimpse at a photographic icon. William Eggleston was born in Tennessee in 1939 and raised in Mississippi. Inspired by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston is credited with being the first photographer to give serious artistic credibility to color film.

Not since Matthew Brady’s work documenting the Civil War has the tintype photographic process been used on the battlefield. Staff sergeant Ed Drew, an aerial gunner in the California Air National Guard, brought tintype back to the theater of war to photograph his fellow soldiers during his deployment from April to June in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

In 1927, Claude Frisse-Greene shot a series of film around London based on a color (or colour) technique that his father had experimenting with. His father, William Friese-Greene, was an early pioneer of cinematography. His process was called 'Biocolour' which produced the illusion of color by exposing alternating frames of black and white film with color filters, then staining the film again with red or green.

“These new ways might be found by men who could abandon their allegiance to traditional pictorial standards—or by the artistically ignorant, who had no old allegiances to break. There have been many of the latter sort. Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other's work…

Released on May 21, 1980, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back has become over the years one of the most epic space films ever. The Star Wars series has resulted in a cultural phenomenon and made a tremendous effect on the film industry. Photos have surfaced showing the behind the scenes action including old tricks used to pull of some of the "mind-blowing" effects we watched as kids. You have got to see these.

The boom for shipbuilding occurred in the early part of the 20th century, fueled by the demand for warships and ship repair yards. It was also the only method of intercontinental travel. But the 1920's gave it its steepest decline - with unemployment reaching almost 40% by the end of the decade. It wasn't uncommon for communnites based almost enetirely around shipbuilding to have nearly three-quarters of its entire city in unemployment.

National Geographic has been the pinnacle of photography for 125 years now. They have continued to set the standard for inspiring the world with their photographs. For the longest time Nat Geo was one of the only ways the world was able to visually share each others cultures. Its fascinating to see how society has changed over the century. Here we look back these beautiful shots from the past 125 years. Thank you Nat Geo for revolutionizing photography.

I have been absolutely fascinated by wetplate processes for a while now: I find the medium absolutely unlike anything else in the world of art and photography, and the one-of-a-kind results from this hand-crafted process are simply beautiful. When I learned that there was a studio in San Francisco that specialized in taking collodion (tintypes, specifically) portraits of clients, I absolutely had to have one done.

Annie Leibovitz is, in my opinion, one of the only photographers that has managed to become a household name. She is so iconic that even people that don't care about photography seem to know who she is. That's why this video is so cool. In it we get to hear a young version of the 63 year old icon talk about her hopes for the future.

Sarah Moon is an icon, without a doubt. Her work has been an inspiration to me from the beginning of my career. She's a soulful and deep artist and has certainly earned her spot as one of the top "100 most influential photographers." That's why hearing her explain the chaos of her mind while she shoots is such an amazing experience for me. It's the very same chaos that I experience, and I bet you do too.

I have always been fascinated by space travel. Back in college a friend showed me a documentary that proposed that the moon landing is a hoax. The arguments were based on photography, videography, and lighting tricks and I remember thinking "wow could this really have been staged?" Mr. SG Collins makes a pretty compelling argument claiming that neither NASA nor Stanley Kubrick were actually technologically capable of producing a video that could stand up to modern scrutiny. Collin's photographic argument should put a final nail in the conspiracists' theory for good.

When I bought my first DSLR 4 years ago, I offered a very enthusiastic "SAYONARA!" to the film era. This wasn't because I'm not grateful for the journey that photography has endured to end up where it is, but because my ADHD spark plug of a mind needed a process that was faster and more efficient than it's film and darkroom roots. Even with the mindset that I have towards the film era and the process of early photography, this video is pretty cool and goes through a brief history of photography via the paradigm of a chemist. Enjoy!

I'm a big fan of the mission and idea behind websites like Kickstarter. I appreciate creating a community of people from all over the world who help each other pursue their dreams. On Indieagogo, a site similar to Kickstarter, I came across this cool project on photographer, Fred Lyons.