National Geographic magazine photographer Joel Sartore is taking a working tour of the American zoos in order to take portraits of the world’s animals. It’s all part of the the Biodiversity Project. Learn more about the Biodiversity Project and see some of those awesome portraits up close at the Neatorama Spotlight Blog. Link

The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’

The idea was resurrected many years later with the “development” of the disposable film camera. Link -via the Presurfer

This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort

The police mug shot was invented by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the early 1880s. Those mug shots were accompanied by body measurements for criminal identification in what was called the Bertillon System. By 1896, the New York Police Department was using the Bertillon System, and the image here is of the first NYPD mug shot. See a gallery of early mug shots at Flavorwire. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

(Image credit: NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services)

Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link

Buzzfeed compiled a collection of images from the year’s news stories that will remind you how many really big events happened in 2011, from natural disasters to citizen protests to legislation to war. Pictured is a girl in isolation in order to assess her exposure to radiation after Japan’s nuclear facilities were compromised by the March earthquake. Link

Expect it every December: lists and more lists of the best and worst everything of the year. This photo gallery helps us to sum up some of the important events of 2011 with photographs that made us pay attention. Reuters covered those events and has a gallery of 100 of their best photos for your perusal. Shown is a protester recorded in January in Cairo. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)

Artist Paul Chiappe has a lot of talent when it comes to making pencil drawings, enough talent that he can actually make his drawings look like blurry vintage photographs. Enjoy more of his impressive works over at Flavorwire.

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Who knew lizards came in so many different colors? While most animals are happy to take on the colors of their environment for camouflage purposes, different species of lizards dress in colors designed to stand out from the crowd during mating season. Luckily, photographers see them as well. See 20 different colorful lizards posing for their pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Ester Inbar)

How to Be a Retronaut has a collection of portraits of married couples a hundred years back or more. Some look strangely alike, and they all look fairly uncomfortable posing for the photographer. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Environmental Graffiti has a gallery of images from an underground crypt in Belgium. It was used for burials for decades, but maintenance was discontinued because of the expense. After years of decay, access to the crypt was closed for safety reasons. But you can see it still. Photographer and urban explorer Sven Fennema takes you on an underground tour with fascinating pictures from his book Anderswelten (Other Worlds).

“The air was very cold and wet, and you could see your every breath – also an experience I will never forget. It was as if death was close beside you somehow. The crypt was full of those strange plastic flowers – still with their bright colors – but it was also full of spiders’ webs and other kinds of decay.”

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(Image credit: Sven Fennema)

It’s not easy getting trees to build a tunnel -they have to grow that way! But after many years, you end up with something spectacular. Check out a list of lovely tree tunnels from around the world, blossoming, growing, dormant, and even photographed in glorious autumn color. This photo shows a tunnel in Portugal. Link -Thanks, David!

(Image credit: Flickr user Raul Lieberwirth)

Environmental Graffiti found ten oases in the middle of cities that provide a good dose of nature for urban dwellers. Some are big enough to have hiking trails, lakes, zoos, forests, gardens, and even observatories. These 26 pictures are a refreshing treat for the eyes! Pictured is the gorgeous Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island in Victoria, B.C. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user WisDoc)

The words “swamp” and “beautiful” do not often appear in the same sentence. However, wetlands are a valuable part of the environment, and if you look past the mosquitoes, they can be quite fetching. See a collection of gorgeous photographs of swamps around the world at Environmental Graffiti. Pictured is the Pantanal, which spans the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user miquitos)

This picture of “various isolates of ascomycete fungi grown on agar nutrient plates” is from a Tumblr blog called Electric Orchids, which features great photographs of anything to do with biology, from exotic animals to fossils to microscope images. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Dr. David Midgley)

You know these two fine-looking young men, even if you’ve never seen a photograph of either one before. They are both featured at My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a photo blog dedicated to the hotties of history, dating back to the invention of the camera. Really, who knew that Hermann Rorschach (of the ink blots) resembled Brad Pitt? The site is accepting submissions of more attractive public domain photographs. In case you are still wondering about the guys here, on the left is Almanzo Wilder, husband of author Laura Ingalls Wilder. On the right is Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. Link -via Metafilter

Doyle, incredibly, had no idea of her connection to Rosie the Riveter. In fact, she didn’t even know about the original inspirational photo, which given her posture, lends an unsettling peeping-Tom vibe to the whole thing. At the time, she’d just graduated high school and, like many other women, had taken a job in a factory in order to support the war effort. American Broach & Machine Co. had her on a metal press in no time at all, probably after a vigorous and thorough safety-training program that only that decade could deliver.

Fearing an injury that could impact her ability to play the cello, Doyle quit after only two weeks on the job. She endured the potential hand crushing long enough for a photographer to snap the picture without her noticing. Someone who did notice, however, was J. Howard Miller, an artist commissioned by the government to draw up some motivating pieces of art.

Read the rest of her story, plus those of other famous faces, at Cracked. Link

The Mothball Fleet is the group of decommissioned Navy ships stored at Suisun Bay, just north of San Francisco. These ships served in conflicts going back to World War II, and now they are gradually being scrapped. Photographer Scott Haefner and friends managed to spend several days exploring and photographing these ships, despite security guards. Read about how they pulled off the caper, and see the collection of photos at Scott’s website. Link -via the Presurfer

Some cuttlefish can mimic the shape of objects around them for camouflage purposes. But recent research shows they can also mimic the shapes of two-dimensional photographs of objects! National Geographic has a photo gallery of cuttlefish doing their best to mimic their backgrounds, whether natural, plastic, 2D, or 3D. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

(Image credit: Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory)

John F. Ptak came across an 1908 newspaper photo essay entitled “The Pleasant Lot of the Inebriate in Captivity: The comfortable quarters of the inmates of a state reformatory for inebriates.”

The life in the state reformatory as an alcoholic British woman was hardly “pleasant” as the title states, though we don’t know what the author was comparing this to.  I suspect it was a general prison that was the benchmark for pleasantness, though perhaps it could have been an insane asylum , assuming of course that they didn’t seem nearly as pleasant as the “pleasant” scenes in these pictures.  The reformatory for alcoholics in Great Britain was established more along the lines of an almshouse or mental institution and seemed not terribly coercive–though given the border decorations for the photos on these pages–keys–there is no doubt that these people were incarcerated “for their own and the community’s good.”

Although the photographs are obviously posed, they are worth a look for their historic value. Link -via Everlasting Blort

The winning robot, designed by Leeds University, has indeed gone further than anyone has ever been before in the pyramid.

The project began with the exploration of the southern shaft, which ends at the so called “Gantenbrink’s door.”

The robot was able to climb inside the walls of the shaft while carrying a “micro snake” camera that can see around corners.

Unlike previous expeditions, in which camera images were only taken looking straight ahead, the bendy camera was small enough to fit through a small hole in a stone “door,” giving researchers a clear view into the chamber beyond. It was at that time that the camera sent back images of 4,500-year-old markings.

“There are many unanswered questions that these images raise,” Richardson told Discovery News. “Why is there writing in this space? What does the writing say? There appears to be a masonry cutting mark next to the figures: why was it not cut along this line?” Roberston wondered.

Read more about the Djedi project at Discovery News. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Djedi Team)

Photographer Todd McLellen’s latest project involves disassembling machines and appliances, sorting and shooting the parts, and then throwing them all in the air as if the gadget is exploding! At his website (click “new work”) you can see more photographs, and a fast-moving video of the process. Link -via Buzzfeed

Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London’s harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.

Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.

Link -via Nag on the Lake

Photographer John C.H. Grabill took pictures of the American West between 1887 and 1892, and sent 188 of those photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Those photographs are now in the public domain, and give us a good look at the people and places of the frontier. The Denver Post published a collection of the pictures, including this portrait of two Oglala chiefs, American Horse and Red Cloud, taken in 1891. The border is printed with “The Grabill Portrait and View Co., Deadwood, S.D. Our company is incorporated under State Laws. Views all copyrighted. Will give a handsome reward for detection of anyone copying our pictures.”

Link | The Grabill Collection -via the Presurfer

Now that Lent is here, we can look back at the pageantry of the Carnival season with a collection of 52 photographs at The Atlantic. See celebrations in Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Haiti, Colombia, Greece, France, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, and the U.S. Some pictures may be NSFW. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: REUTERS/Jose Miguel Gomez)

The first ever Miami Comic-Con was last weekend, and Jen from CakeWrecks was there with her camera. See a lot more pictures of Ghostbusters, Bat people, zombies, and assorted super heroes at Epbot. Link

A couple of years ago we posted about an infinite photo called As Seen on Earth. National Geographic has a new infinite photo project called Tropical Island. At the link, you can select a piece of the image and click to zoom in on more images, and then click again to zoom in to yet more! You’ll also find information about the creatures pictured. The images are of the life forms of the beautiful South Pacific island of Mo‘orea. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: the Biocode Project and National Geographic contributing photographer David Liittschwager)

Do you remember what stood at the site in New York City before the World Trade Center was built? It was the Hudson Terminal Building, a massive office building covering two city blocks. This century-old picture of the Hudson Terminal Building is part of a wonderful collection of pictures called Vintage New York at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

The Liljenquist family collected thousands of photographs of Civil War soldiers over the years. Brandon Liljenquist saw a collection of war photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and was inspired to make the Civil War photos public. This year, the family donated 400 of those pictures to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure.

Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the faces of these boys were to those we’d seen in The Washington Post. Here were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me.

The original photographs will be on display next year in Washington, but are available now online. Link to story. Link to photographs. -via Metafilter

Sacha Goldberger took a fanciful series of photographs of his grandmother Frederika in a super hero costume. The 91-year-old was delighted with the project. You see her here stopping traffic; other photos show Super Mamika campaigning for office, flying into buildings, and even one where she’s in bed with Superman! Mrs. Goldberger’s real life story is a fascinating read as well. After the photo shoot, “Mamika” attracted thousands of fans on MySpace and elsewhere. Link -Thanks, Alice!

As the 19th century turned into the 20th century, woman tried their hands at sports that they were previously prohibited from participating in. See vintage photographs of women playing soccer, baseball, cricket, bowling, tennis, and other sports. The boxing match pictured here took place on March 7th, 1912 between Mrs. Edwards and Fraulein Kussin. Link

(Image credit: The Library of Congress)

From the folks who brought us Growing Up Heroes comes another nostalgia blog, this one dedicated to Halloween. You are invited to submit photographs of your childhood Halloween costumes, and enjoy pictures of trick-or-treat long ago. Personally, I don’t see this adorable Ewok from 1985 as “long ago”, but there are pictures from different eras as well. Link

Ransom Riggs collects old snapshots, and particularly likes pictures on which someone has written something personal.

One thing I’ve found a lot of is photos where people have written deprecating things — usually about themselves — on the back. “I look so fat here!” is a shockingly common theme; I guess people were as concerned with their weight (and as self-conscious about pictures of themselves) fifty and sixty years ago as they are today. I want to share some of these with you, not so much to laugh at (although they are funny) but to demonstrate how little our attitudes about ourselves have changed over the years.

In case you can’t read it, the note on this picture says, “I’m not as fat as I look here, it’s the terrycloth pajamas over my bathing skirt plus wind.” See lots more pictures at mental_floss. Link

Urban explorer Kyle Merriman, who brought us pictures of Nara Dreamland, has a new collection of photographs from an abandoned hospital in Tainan, Taiwan.

As we entered it was clear we weren’t the first visitors it had received. Prescription drugs, lay scattered across tables and floors, while others remained unopened. Broken syringes crunched underfoot and bottles of formaldehyde still kept their mysterious contents. The wind followed us inside, slamming random doors and causing the peeling wallpaper to dance. It was a spooky place to say the least.

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If you enjoyed Jill’s post 30+ Excellent Comic Con Costumes From 2010, you can see more of the many photographs she took during the convention. Find them in the posts Comic-Con Costumes from 2010, 25 More Pics of Sexy Comic Con Cosplay Girls, and at mental_floss, Independent Comic Con Artists.

The Denver Post photo blog has a wonderful collection of aerial photographs of New York City. I had trouble selecting just one to tease you with. Link -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

The Denver Post has printed a gallery of color pictures taken by photographers of the the US Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information during the Great Depression and World War II. Most were transferred from color slides. The photographs are now part of the Library of Congress. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45 — negotiated down from $70 — are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million, according to a Beverly Hills art appraiser.

Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates.

“It truly is a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career,” said David W. Streets, the appraiser and art dealer who is hosting an unveiling of the photographs at his Beverly Hills, California, gallery Tuesday.

The photographs apparently were taken between 1919 and the early 1930s, well before Adams — who is known as the father of American photography — became nationally recognized in the 1940s, Streets said.

Link -via Boing Boing

Geeks Are Sexy presents the ABCs of geekdom, illustrating each of the 26 letters with Creative Commons photography. And when you read them all together, they make a really geeky poem! Link

(image credits: a, Mild Mannered Photographer and b, jpstanley)

When the dorkiest guy in a collection of pictures is Mick Jagger, you know you’re in for a treat. Pictured is Clark Gable. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Jeff Kisseloff interviewed grocer Harry Dubin about an article written about him in 1947, but then found something much more interesting about Dubin.

I picked up the album and opened it, and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. Inside were some 30 color photographs taken in and around the city in the 1940s. I had never seen such vibrant photos of the city in those years. In fact, I had never seen any color photos of the city in those years, yet here they were. It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something, all of them were Harry!

Needless to say, while our subsequent interview was wonderful, the album left me speechless in delight. These were the most evocative photographs of old New York I had ever seen. Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.

You might want to check back with The Kisseloff Collection as more pictures are added. Link -via Metafilter

The Big Picture has photographs from all over the world illustrating the different ways people celebrate the new year. Yes, there are plenty of fireworks, but also bonfires, skits, costumes, swimming, praying, gunfire, and other customs. This picture was taken in Bhopal, India. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: REUTERS/Raj Patidar)

Children of the Victorian Era had to be tough, because this Santa Claus would have given me nightmares! This picture is a detail of a larger family portrait from Flickr user stevechasmar. For sheer weirdness, it just might beat out the previous creepy Santa post. See more Victorian Christmas ephemera in his photostream. Link -via Buzzfeed

Would you let your children pose with this Santa and his taxidermy donkey? This postcard is part of an extensive collection of found photos belonging to Albert Tanquero. I spent a lot of time this morning looking through pages and pages of his Flickr stream of old photographs, each of which has a story we may never know. Link -via mental_floss (where you’ll find more creepy Santas)

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Anyone who takes digital pictures gets a real kick out of how crime investigators on the CSI TV shows use their computers to zoom in and enhance photographs, as if you could really zoom in to just a few pixels and see a legible image. Now you can! The CSI Image Enhancer lets you zoom in on a photograph just by typing furiously and saying “enhance!” Well, really, all you have to do is type furiously. Try this one as an example. Upload your own photos to make a personal enhancement of your own. Link -via b3ta

(image found at Arbroath)

The Opium Museum is, at the heart, about the trade in rare antiques, since opium smoking paraphernalia was outlawed. Still, there are pages and pages of the history of opium and its use in countries all over the world, with many historical photographs.

Beginning in the 18th century, opium accompanied the Chinese diaspora: first to the Chinese quarters of Asian cities, and later to the Chinatowns of the West, particularly North America, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner and with Chinese-made paraphernalia became fashionable among non-Chinese.

Once the drug was banned and its paraphernalia outlawed, these illicit items were heaped into piles and burned in public bonfires. From Shanghai to Saigon to San Francisco, the means to smoke opium were destroyed along with the drug itself. So few examples of these relics remain that most experts on Chinese art are blithely unaware of just how sumptuous and opulent this art form had become during its heyday.

For serious collectors, there is information on how to identify genuine opium tools and have them appraised. Link -via Metafilter

Jill Heinerth has spent the past 14 years exploring underwater caves all over the world. Wired has a gallery of beautiful photographs she’s taken in underwater caves, lava tubes, and glaciers. This picture was taken at Devil’s Eye Spring off the coast of northern Florida. Link -via Digg

What better for a Labor Day cookout than a steak in the shapes of the USA? Philadelphia artist Dominic Episcopo took photographs of states that look good enough to grill. Link -via the Presurfer

It’s easy to fall in love with this photo series from Vlad Artazov. With only bent nails and some basic sets, he is able to convey a whole spectrum of human emotions. The result is beautiful and surprisingly, sadly touching. View the whole gallery to get the full effect.

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