World Photo Day!

Hey everybody, hope everyone is alright and has been enjoying the past week! Nothing exciting has happened in our house, unfortunately my mum hasn’t been very well with her leg, it’s taking a long time to heal which is a bit worrying, we’re hoping that it will start to get better soon 🤞🏼

Anyway, digressing away from that, today’s post as you can see from the title is about World Photo Day, as photography is a passion of mine and something I always love to progress further in, I thought a look back in history of some of the greatest photos ever taken might be a cool idea, so here are just twelve of the best pictures throughout history..

Greatest Photos Ever Taken + Facts

Since the early 19th century, photography has become an ever-increasing medium of personal expression and appreciation for countless people around the world. A photograph has the ability to capture a place; an experience; an idea; a moment in time. For this reason, it’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Photographs can convey a feeling faster than, and sometimes even more effectively than words can. A photograph can make the viewer see the world the way the photographer sees it. Photographs even transcend the passing of time – a photo from a hundred years ago can still be as appreciated now, as it was then. A photo taken tomorrow, can still be just as appreciated by others in a hundred years’ time. Take a look at twelve of the greatest photos ever taken…

V-J Day In Times Square:

• Photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945.
• The Duo’s identity was never established, but after years of research, the names of two people kept popping up – George Mendonsa and Greta zimmer Friedman.
• The photograph was taken at 5:51 p.m. ET.
• It was taken with a Leica IIIa camera.
• The photograph was shot just south of 45th Street looking north from a location where Broadway and Seventh Avenue converge.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper:

• Photographed by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932.
• The photograph depicts 11 men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling 840 feet (260 meters) above the New York City streets.
• The original negative is stored in a cave in Pennsylvania.
• A Documentary helped establish two of the men’s identities – Joseph Eckner (the third from the left) and Joe Curtis (third from the right).
• Taken during the Great Depression.

Earthrise:

• Photographed by William Anders in 1968.
• The photograph was taken from lunar orbit.
• Nature photographer Galen Rowell declared it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”.
• The camera had a simple sighting ring rather than the standard reflex viewfinder and was loaded with a 70 mm film magazine containing custom Ektachrome film developed by Kodak.
• The photo has been credited for inspiring the beginning of the environmental movement.

Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki:

• Photographed by Lieutenant Charles Levy in 1945.
• The explosion came just days after the detonation of the world’s first deployed atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy”.
• It was the only image to emerge that would show the massive cloud in its entirety.
• Levy’s indelible image of the mushroom cloud spread through culture as a somewhat superficial emblem of victory and power.
• Levy’s image shows a giant plume of smoke and debris erupting from the earth and piercing through the clouds, reaching over eight miles into the sky.

A Man On The Moon:

• Photographed by Neil Armstrong in 1969.
• The astronaut in the photo is Buzz Aldrin.
• More than 40 years after the event, it remains an iconic image of human achievement in the 20th century.
• The still camera developed for use on the Moon was the Hasselblad EDC (Electric Data Camera) that had been specially adapted from the motorised Hasselblad 500 EL.
• The highly prized mission photographs were originally published in the December 1969 issue of National Geographic magazine and Armstrong’s photograph of Aldrin was chosen for the cover. It has remained the defining image of the momentous Apollo 11 mission ever since.

Pillars Of Creation:

• Photographed by NASA in 1995.
• The astronomers responsible for the photo were Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen from Arizona State University.
• The great smokestacks are vast clouds of interstellar dust, shaped by the high-energy winds blowing out from nearby stars (the black portion in the top right is from the magnification of one of Hubble’s four cameras).
• Research from 2007 suggested that a stellar supernova 6,000 years ago could have already blown the pillars out of formation and into space.
• The Eagle Nebula is so giant and bright that amateur astronomers don’t need equipment as sophisticated as the Hubble Space Telescope to view this magnificent star cloud.

Migrant Mother:

• Photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936.
• The photograph’s pictorial strength and emotional impact, combined with its recurring presence in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, and displays, cemented its place in America’s collective memory of the era.
• Taken in a tent at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California.
• It has become a touchstone for photographers who feel that their work should not only record social conditions but also persuade people to improve them.
• The woman in the photo is thirty-two-year-old migrant farmworker Florence Owens Thompson and her children.

The Hindenburg Disaster:

• Photographed by Sam Shere in 1937.
• The crash helped bring the age of the airships to a close, and Shere’s powerful photograph of one of the world’s most formative early air disasters persists as a cautionary reminder of how human fallibility can lead to death and destruction.
• The Hindenburg disaster in Manchester Township, New Jersey, United States.
• The airship made its debut flight on March 4, 1936.
• Built by the German Zeppelin Company in the 1930s.

Dalí Atomicus:

• Photographed by Philippe Halsman in 1948.
• Halsman created an elaborate scene to surround the artist that included the original work, a floating chair and an in-progress easel suspended by thin wires.
• It took 26 takes to capture a composition that satisfied Halsman.
• Assistants, including Halsman’s wife and young daughter Irene, stood out of the frame and, on the photographer’s count, threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air while Dalí leaped up.
• Dalí added a finishing touch to the printed photograph: the swirls of paint that appear on the easel.

Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston:

• Photographed by Neil Leifer in 1965.
• Leifer had taken that ringside spot in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965, as 23-year-old heavyweight boxing champion Ali squared off against 34-year-old Sonny Liston, the man he’d snatched the title from the previous year.
• Leifer was using a 21⁄4in-square Rolleiflex, partly for the high quality of the images it produced and partly for the 1/500sec sync speed it offered with strobe lighting, enabling him to freeze the action.
• After one minute and 44 seconds, what many called a Phantom Punch, Liston’s body hit the ground. It was a knockout.
• Even though the photo is over 50 years old it almost looks like a studio shot. It was mainly thanks to the powerful lights that the studio effect was achieved but also thanks to cigar smoke in the ring.

First Cell-Phone Picture:

• Photographed by Philippe Kahn in 1997.
• Philippe Kahn instantly shared a photo from the birth of his daughter to over 2,000 connections around the world.
• Kahn used Casio QV-10, the first consumer digital camera with the LCD screen. He connected the cellphone to his laptop, and he ripped up the speakerphone from the car to do it. A long wire connected the camera to his laptop, and the laptop was connected to the server that was back in his home.
• Taken in Santa Cruz, California.
• He now focuses his time on Fullpower, which is best known for its mobile sensing platform called MotionX that embeds wired solutions into products for brands such as Nike+ and Jawbone’s UP band.

Milk Drop Coronet:

• Photographed by Harold Edgerton in 1957.
• Edgerton combined the camera with the stroboscope, a device invented in 1831 for studying objects in motion.
• Milk Drop Coronet, his revolutionary stop-motion photograph, freezes the impact of a drop of milk on a table, a crown of liquid discernible to the camera for only a millisecond.
• Edgerton worked for years to perfect his milk-drop photographs, many of which were black and white; one version was featured in the first photography exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1937.
• His impact on photographic technology and influence on photographers can still be seen in the contemporary sphere of photography.

These are only some of the greatest pictures ever taken in history, there are many more that can be found in art galleries or online, I’d recommend having a look at them!

Thank you for reading today’s post, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your week, and I will see you next Wednesday. 😃