The ‘Second Great Fire of London is commemorated in a famous photograph taken from the roof of the Daily Mail building by Herbert Mason, in which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rises above clouds of black smoke.

Photographer: Herbert Mason
Source: wikipedia.org

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong put his left foot on the rocky Moon. It was the first human footprint on the Moon. They had taken TV cameras with them. The first footprints on the Moon will be there for a million years. There is no wind to blow them away.

Photographer: Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin
Source: nasa.gov

Lenna is the name given to a standard test image cropped from a Playboy magazine centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg who posed for the November 1972 issue. The image is the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms.

The picture’s history was described in the May 2001 newsletter of the IEEE Professional Communication Society:

“Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague’s conference paper. They got tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.

The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 × 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject’s shoulders.”

Photographer: Playboy
Source: wikipedia.org

Famous photograph of Che Guevara was taken on March 5, 1960 by Alberto Korda at a funeral service for victims of the La Coubre explosion, it was published seven years later. Che Guevara was 31 at the time of the photo.

Photographer: Alberto Korda
Source: wikipedia.org