In 1935 during the midst of the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration hired Roy Stryker to head a historical bureau within the FSA. He hired, among others, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein to document the hardships that Americans faced at the time. These...

Have you ever wondered why prints in the old days were sepia toned? Because it improves the archival qualities of images, sepia toning was used to resist the damage that occurs with time and exposure to light, humidity, and the like. Sepia toning involved chemicals that turned the metallic silver...

Steve Sasson, an engineer, is credited with designing the first digital camera while employed at Kodak in 1975. The camera was a behemoth, weighing in at 8 pounds. It took black and white images at a scintillating 0.01 megapixels. Given those stats, it’s amazing how far photography technology has...

Early photographers had quite a risky job, as the chemicals used in processing images, including mercury, lye, and silver nitrate, were extremely dangerous. In fact, early photographers often suffered from chemical poisoning, which could lead to mental health issues or even death. As a result,...

Your PT Tuesday Newsletter In 1916, some photographers started to focus on abstraction, which had not been fully embraced yet in the photography community. Photographers like Alvin Langdon Coburn, Bernard S. Horne, and Margaret Watkins made names for themselves by creating abstract images in which...

Your PT Tuesday Newsletter The word “photography” is taken from the Greek words photos, which means “light,” and graphein, which means “to draw.” It is believed that “photography” was first used by Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839. Interestingly, the first usage of the word came...

As popular as funny photos of cats are on the internet today, it’s actually something that’s been practiced since the beginning of photography as an artform. One of the earliest cat photographers was Harry Pointer, who, from his studio in England, arranged felines in humorous poses and costumes...

One of the largest seamless photographs ever taken is an astonishing 34 meters wide by 10 meters tall. The photograph is of the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro, California, and features the station’s runways and control towers. The image was taken by converting an entire jet hanger into an...