With the proliferation of digital photography, kids know about posing for photos, taking photos, and browsing photos on phones. But how much do they know about the history of photo technologies? This TED Ed video, Illuminating photography: From camera obscura to camera phone by Eva Timothy and Andy London, is a great primer.

Elderly people with Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia sometimes forget to use the manual brakes on their wheelchairs, which then fall out from under them when they try to stand or sit. When this was brought to the attention of crop farmer Jerry Ford, he decided to do something about it. His invention is a rather clever automatic brake system for manual wheelchairs. It’s even designed in a way that still allows the wheelchair to fold up for transport.

This portrait is just one from a series of videos and photographs about inventors by photographer David Friedman.

Using his paraglider, photographer George Steinmetz flies above some of the most diverse and extreme deserts in the world… sand dunes, volcanic peaks, brightly colored hot springs, ancient cities, unusual farms, herds of wild animals… pattern upon amazing pattern. Look at them all online or find them in his book, Desert Air, after watching this video from National Geographic.

Noah Kalina has been taking photos of himself every day for 12.5 years — that’s 4514 photos from January 11, 2000 - June 30, 2012. His video of the first 6-ish years, with music by Carly Comando, went viral in 2006 and has been parodied and imitated many times over.

via Kottke.

From the archives: more videos about time, including Lotte, every week from birth until 12 years old and Irina Werning’s Back to the Future project.

Using image sequences from NASA’s Cassini Solstice and Voyager missions, filmmaker Sander van den Berg has illuminated Saturn and its rings, Jupiter, moons, space and a bunch of other stuff.

The score is an instrumental version of That Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, which gives this footage a completely different feel than a video I saw late last year by filmmaker Chris Abbas when he put this same footage to Nine Inch Nails. Both videos are riveting, no? 

Thanks, @mamagotcha.