We take a lot for granted in the digital era, particularly the automation of a lot of functions. In the early days of film, everything was fully manual, and even one parameter set incorrectly could ruin an entire roll. Later in the 20th century, a standard called DX (Digital indeX) was introduced, and it automated a lot of settings, reducing errors and making photography more accessible to amateurs and casual users. How did it work? This neat video takes you behind the scenes of the surprisingly sophisticated system.

If you frequent this site, there's a pretty good chance you love photography. But how much do you actually know about its origins? Most of us rightfully jump to the camera obscura when thinking about the beginnings of photography, but how did we get from there to today's modern cameras? Have you ever wondered what the first photo ever taken was of? Or what the world's first color photo was of?

The daguerrotype was one of the earliest means of capturing images onto a surface and was the first photographic process available to the public. Using a piece of silver-coated copper and a 35mm film camera, this videos shows you how to make your own.

What makes a photograph or movie memorable? With cinema as widespread as it is, a film needs to stand out in a big way, not only to succeed at the box office, but to be remembered in any capacity. As for photographs, it's the same challenge. We remember the Tiananmen Square protest photo because it captured the issues sweeping the globe in a single frame. Films like "The Shining" and "There Will Be Blood" are relatively simple in terms of visuals, but have stories that will forever make them classics. And that's exactly what makes a film or a photograph great: story.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the greatest photographers of all time. What is it that gave him his style, and how would you go about recreating it? This video tries to find out.

At first black and white photos were the only way images could be developed, printed, and shown to the world. With digital technology and having all the information at our fingertips allows some obsessive artists delve into the past to bring the past to life by adding color and making the images more relatable. Or does it? Some people have argued that the past shouldn't be altered, and that it must be left as is, preserved and untouched. They argue that the images shape history, and should remain as factually correct as possible. However, when watching the video and seeing the way the images are transformed surely adds another level to the ability to relate to the images.

Movies exist to tell stories. Through writing, performance, sound, and photography, they share with us worlds and visions that help us interpret the real world outside of the theatre doors. So what are the best films made about our lives as photographers?

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Capa, the iconic war photographer and Magnum Photos co-founder whose life, documented in the autobiography Slightly Out of Focus, is the stuff of legend. Capa's centenary has brought with it a number of undiscovered treasures from his life including his only surviving audio interview from October 1947 but also a rich collection of slide film taken on assignment from 1938 until his death in 1954.

The world's oldest webcam is finally shutting down after a whopping quarter-century of service, marking the end of an era that began in the infancy of the modern internet we know today.

The year was 2000: the Y2K bug had turned out to be a flop, a man purchased $200 million in Ansel Adams negatives for $45 at a garage sale, and Canon released their first DSLR, the D30, a camera that would go on to have a significant impact on the photography industry. What was the D30 like? This neat video review takes a look at the camera.

To almost any photographer today, if you mention "APS," they think of crop sensor cameras, namely APS-C or perhaps the APS-H sensor in older models in Canon's 1D line. However, if you mentioned it two decades ago, the response would have been very different.

It's Christmas week and the 12 weeks of Christmas reaches its last installment. There had to be a number 1 and what better choice than the most iconic photo of all time?

There's still plenty of families and communities that heavily rely upon the forestry industry. Finland, a country many of us associate with deep woods and arctic temperatures, continues to carry the strong legacy of those who spent their lives working in the forest, and as such, photographer Sanna Vornanen celebrates the lives of lumberjacks all around the world through her latest project.

thinkTank's ongoing series, "About A Photo," is a tremendous peek into the process of some amazing photographers. The series has the featured photographer narrate the story of one of their images. In this episode, William Albert Allard speaks about his photograph of a cowboy named Stan and why he doesn't take a photo of someone - but into them.

Large format film remains separate from all other film and digital as a craft with an entirely different skill set and method of working. This beautiful segment takes a look at one photographer who's racing the clock to finish his work, after which he'll hang up his camera for good.

An image is eye catching when it's extraordinary. So why is it that the ordinary and banal can appear extraordinary? And if that really is the case, how can we go about achieving that?

It's very easy to find information online about new cameras, news, rumors, reviews, and which camera you should be using right now. But there's far less information to be found about older cameras. Like many photographers, I find it interesting to look at the origins of photography and how far the science and technology in cameras has come in a relatively short period of time.

Non-photographers often complain about black and white images: they’re dated, they’re just a gimmick, or they’re elitist and boring. These are personal preferences; however, we live in a color world, so you can't discount that black and white images can create a disconnect for modern viewers. To bring history alive, is colorization a solution?

One of the neatest things about early digital photography was that because few things were really standardized, there were numerous interesting designs and experiments with features. Sony's Mavica line was one such example of this, and this awesome video takes a look at the camera 24 years after its release.

One photographer has been shooting portraits with the aim of recreating well-known portraits of some of history’s most prominent figures, but with an interesting perspective: his subjects are the descendants of said historical figures. For one portrait in particular, he located Thomas Jefferson’s sixth great-grandson,.

If you're a photographer or really any kind of creative, you've probably at some point experienced the existential crisis along the lines of "does my work mean anything? Does anyone care?" This reminder that even the greatest among us had humble beginnings should put a smile on your face.

The ingenious details that went into the purely mechanical design of early SLR cameras are incredible, and this in-depth video gives you a remarkable insight into how the light metering system functioned inside the legendary Canon F-1.

Today marks a special day for the beloved Adobe Photoshop, as today is it's 25th birthday. Even at only 25 years old, Photoshop has had a number of facelifts. From it's initial release, Photoshop was revolutionary in it's tools, and still remains to be the best tool for photographers today. So lets take a look at all the changes this iconic software has seen over these last twenty five years.

Alex Bartsch has done the incredible. Through a lot of research and after climbing over fences and onto roofs, he sought out 42 locations where reggae artists had photos taken for their album artwork. He even got into the living room of former Trojan label owner Marcel Rodd in Hampstead to take a photo in front of the fireplace. His work documents an era of London's reggae scene between 1967 and 1987.

Bartsch's series looks like it took a lot of hard work. Either the artists, label owners, or photographers had to be tracked down to get...

Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) portrayed working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. The Library of Congress' National Child Labor Committee Collection includes more than 5,100 photographs that came with the records of the organization. Many of the pictures are familiar, but others are relatively unexplored.

Time Magazine will be counting down their selection of the 100 most influential images of all time this month. According to the magazine, the very first photograph was taken back in 1826, so they are presenting this project to coincide with celebrating the "175th anniversary of photography and the birth of photojournalism."

Early last year, the Smithsonian announced that they would be opening up their digital collection for the world to see. The first phase constitutes over 40,000 pieces of art, including over 400 photographs, from the Freer and Sackler Galleries and the Freer Study Collection, all of which focus on the museum’s Asian gallery collections. The collections are available for anyone to download and use for free for non-commercial use under a program they call Open F|S.

Chances are you've seen historical footage from NASA at some point in your life, whether in a movie, on television, on the Internet. That footage was extremely hard to film, however, and this great video examines the technical challenges behind shooting rocket launches and space.

It started in the year 1900 with a trip to Montana to photograph the ritual Sun Dance of the Blackfoot Tribe, and ended with photographer Edward Curtis having photographed 100 Native American tribes, producing 2,200 photographs that would come to comprise a 20 volume anthology called "The North American Indian," bankrolled by investor J.P. Morgan to the tune of $75,000. In the article written by Elisabeth Sherman for All That Is Interesting, you can see 33 of his most stunning portraits.

"Set up in 1936, Life magazine believed that pictures could change the world."

America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine is a fantastic documentary from the BBC about the life of one of the most important magazines in American history. Narrated by acclaimed photographer Rankin, it follows the people who told the 'story of America' through its most dynamic decades - the 40s, 50s and 60s - and documented its growth into a world superpower.

Color is the word this week, from the pioneering, contemporary, and successful work of Paul Outerbrdige through to applying the Orton Effect to color landscape images... or indeed, any images.

Behind every photo is a story, one that is often far more complex and nuanced than can be encapsulated in a single frame of a single moment in time. Go behind the scenes of this famous photo and hear how the story of its subjects is far more complex than the image and its title make it seem.

A new photo has surfaced of the famed western outlaw Billy the Kid, purchased for about $2 in a junk shop in California, that could easily be worth upward of $5 million. The lucky man behind the photo purchase is Randy Guijarro who picked it up in a store around Fresno, California in 2010. Awaiting authentication for just over a year it has finally been claimed to be the kid himself.

In the early 1980s, famed fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon embarked on a project to create a collection of portraits that aimed to depict the people of the American West in a raw and unembellished manner. With this project, "The American West," his intention was to move away from the glamorous world of fashion photography and instead focus on the everyday individuals who inhabited the American West.

In a world where flipping our images between color and black and white is as simple as the click of the mouse, photographers and cinematographers today aren’t often tasked with knowing the complexity of how those vibrant colors actually come into existence. But in the early days of cinema, when competing processes for color reproduction took turns as the next best innovation, one name reigned supreme: Technicolor.

It's hard to believe that digital cameras have been in existence for over four decades, but thanks to one creative engineer, we have one of the most ubiquitous pieces of modern technology. Hear the story of the birth of our beloved cameras from the inventor himself.

Every one of us, in some way, has had our lives impacted by George Eastman. Founding Eastman Kodak in 1888, he set out to change how people photographed. He began by creating the first roll of film in 1884 - a departure from the traditional method of using glass plates and a sink. One year later, he put that roll of film into the first Eastman camera. These were the first steps of a 20-year quest that would lead him to his most iconic camera...the Brownie.

The TLR camera has long gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced by SLRs, but you can still find used TLRs for purchase, with Rolleiflex models generally being the most sought after. This fun video follows a street photographer as he shoots with a Rolleiflex 2.8F TLR camera.

As photographers we are artists, so what we display on our own walls, in our own living spaces, should be of paramount importance to us. What do you display for others to see?

Did you know that some of the earliest combat images were captured on personal pocket cameras by professional soldiers (amateur photographers), not by official or professional photographers?

Drug and alcohol addiction often go hand in hand with art. Painting has Van Gogh and Pollock, poetry has Coleridge and Ginsburg, music has The Beatles and Jim Morrison, and novels have Burroughs and Welsh. I was, however, surprised by how little information I could find about photographers’ substance abuse. Where are the in-depth books about photographers that were inspired or crushed by their addictions?

The sheer number of new cameras in the last few decades is staggering, but even so, there are still standout performers that either set the pace or changed the game completely. This video will go through the top 10 and why they had such a profound impact on the industry.

Important photographs have changed the world in a number of ways since the camera's inception. This is one of the more somber and chilling uses for a photograph.

F is a big letter of the alphabet photographically speaking and so, to mark this, the two topics in this post are split in two in order to do justice to them. First up is the iconic brand Fuji.

In this episode of National Geographic Live! Peter Essick talks about the journey of creating his new book, The Ansel Adams Wilderness, and what it's like to pay tribute to (and follow in the tripod holes of) perhaps the greatest nature photographer to walk the planet. The work interprets the influence of Adams' work for a digital age, capturing the Sierra Nevada wilderness in a manner that can only be described as timeless.

From 1920-1956, Ernst Leitz II was the head of Leica Camera, but perhaps his most impressive achievement took place from 1933-1939 when Leitz and his family rescued hundreds of Jews by smuggling them out of Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Leitz, concerned for the safety of many of his Jewish employees, transferred them (along with retailers, family members and friends of family members) out of the country to sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States.