Since the companies mining the oil from the sands of Alberta wouldn't provide access to their operations to a reporter, he rented a plane and took a bunch of photos.
As Stewart said, "Better than I thought".
Cory Poole made this video of the annular solar ecplise yesterday using 700 photographs from a telescope with "a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it."
Cory says: "The filter only allows light that is created when hydrogen atoms go from the 2nd excited state to the 1st excited state." Very cool.
Tadao Cern sets people up in front of powerful fans and takes their pictures. Instant fun house:
Many more of Cern's photos are available on Facebook. (via colossal)
A group photograph of MGM's stars and starlets under contract, taken for the studio's 20th anniversary in 1943.
The full-size photo is available at Mlkshk or at Wikipedia for stargazing. Here's who's in the photo:
Front Row: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Lucille Ball, Hedy Lamarr, Katharine Hepburn, Louis B Mayer, Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Susan Peters, Ginny Simms, Lionel Barrymore
Second Row: Harry James, Brian Donlevy, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Pierre Aumont, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, Jackie Jenkins
Third Row: Tommy Dorsey, George Murphy, Jean Rogers, James Craig, Donna Reed, Van Johnson, Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Ruth Hussey, Marjorie Main, Robert Benchley
Fourth Row: Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Keenan Wynn, Diana Lewis, Marilyn Maxwell, Esther Williams, Ann Richards, Marta Linden, Lee Bowman, Richard Carlson, Mary Astor
Fifth Row: Blanche Ring, Sara Haden, Fay Holden, Bert Lahr, Frances Gifford, June Allyson, Richard Whorf, Frances Rafferty, Spring Byington, Connie Gilchrist, Gladys Cooper
Sixth Row:
Ben Blue, Chill Wills, Keye Luke, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, Henry O'Neill, Bob Crosby, Rags Ragland
Not sure if these are straight photos or digital composites or whatever, but I like the images from Paul Octavious' Puffin Clouds series.
(via @itscolossal)
A collection of vintage mugshots from the 1920s. Crime used to be a lot more civilized.
(thx, david)
Yesterday I linked to the massive trove of photos recently put online by the NYC Department of Records. Alan Taylor from In Focus went through a large chunk of the archive and pulled out some real gems. Great stuff.
From the Museum of the City of New York, a collection of photos taken by Stanley Kubrick in 1946 of New York City subway passengers.
The museum has in its collection more than 7200 photos taken by Kubrick of NYC while he worked as a photographer for Look Magazine. (via coudal)
The New York City Department of Records has put a huge portion of the Municipal Archive's collection of photos online, more than 870,000 in all. The server is overwhelmed at times due to heavy usage, the searching/browsing interface is not what you'd call cutting edge, and many of the photos are available in thumbnail size only, but this is still an incredible resource.
Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1914:
The unfinished Manhattan Bridge in 1908:
A pair of men lay dead in an elevator shaft after a failed robbery attempt:
Looking east on 42nd Street, circa 1890:
More of these photos can be seen at The Daily Mail. (thx, miro)
Using a digital camera, Mechanical Turk, and a thermal printer, Matt Richardson's Descriptive Camera outputs descriptions of photos instead of the photos themselves.
After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still "developing" in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.
This seems like a distant cousin of Unphotographable. (via hacker news)
As Allen Fuqua travels around, he looks for movie locations and attempts to duplicate scenes from them. For instance, here's Allen and a friend reenacting a scene from Drive:
(thx, stephen)
I was under the impression that not many photographs of the Titanic existed...especially those taken on the ship. But amateur photographer Francis Browne was aboard the Titanic from Southampton to Cobh, Ireland and captured many images of the ship's interior, exterior, and voyage. The photos were widely known in the aftermath of the sinking but have been little seen since then.
Browne took this as he was boarding the ship:
The infamous deck chairs:
Browne traveled on a first class ticket...this is a view of some passengers on the second class promenade:
This was taken shortly after the ship dropped anchor in Cobh. Browne obviously did not take this photo because he was still aboard the ship...he acquired it from a photography friend after the fact:
And this is one of the last photos taken of Titanic before Bob Ballard and his team found the wreckage in the mid-80s:
These photos will be a big blow to the remaining folks who believe that the Titanic was fictional:
The Collective Snapshot is a photographic series by Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa which blends "together dozens of snapshots to create an abstraction of the places we've been and the things we've seen." He layers multiple pictures from several angles to create one image familiar and foreign at the same time.
His 'Reconstructed Works' aren't bad either. And, oh, look at these carousels. (via My Modern Met)
If you're an aspiring photographer, here are ten photographers that you should ignore, presumably so that you can develop your own voice and style instead.
Robert Frank was a one-man revolution. Before him pictures for the most part were pretty and clean and pre-visualized, and shot from a tripod. Frank came along and tore a new A-hole in that aesthetic. Fortunately he had something to replace it with: a strong personal vision. Most young photographers who follow in his footsteps don't. They mistake grain, guts, and verve with substance. Sorry folks, but hitting three out of four doesn't count. I know it took cajones to shoot that cowboy bar at 1 am pushing your film to 3200, but that doesn't keep your photo from being boring. Time to shoot something you care about, and don't try to convince me it's flags or the underclass.
This follows a list of "harmful" novels for aspiring writers.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and '60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper just the way we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.
I wonder if there might be a similar list for designers or artists?
Ilona Szwarc made a series of portraits of American girls with their American Girl dolls.
For her project My Pie Town, Debbie Grossman modified Depression-era photos to depict all-female families.
Joan Myers' biography of Doris Caudill (Doris is in many of the pictures), Pie Town Woman, describes her husband, Faro, as less than helpful on the homestead. I had downloaded a portrait of Doris and Faro from the Library of Congress website, and because it was so high-resolution, it occurred to me that I had enough pixels to work with that I could alter the image. I removed Faro, and I loved the opportunity to look at Doris on her own and imagine a different life for her. I thought it would be fun to remake the whole town in a way that reflected my own family, and I imagined a Pie Town filled with women.
The main reason for doing so was to give us the unusual experience of getting to see a contemporary idea of family (female married couples as parents, for example) as if it were historical. But I am also very interested in using Photoshop to create imaginary or impossible images-this is something I have done in other work as well.
(via @riondotnu)
This is the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria, built in 1981 in honor of Communism. After Bulgaria turned away from Communism in 1989, it fell to ruin.
I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz'ol'ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria. Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting 'Bulgaria from the Air'. Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil's hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.
The Holga is a cheap toy camera with a simple lens that takes pictures prized by some for their happy accidents (light leaks, distortions, etc.). The Holga D is a concept that translates the Holga experience to digital.
From the front it may look like just another digital camera, may be a bit minimal, but the backside is surprising, as it does not have a display!
Even though Holga D is a digital camera, in order to achieve its simplicity, it reduces the feature set to absolute minimum.
Even the display is not there! So your photographs remain mysterious until you download the images. This makes the experience quite similar to the good old film based cameras.
(via buzzfeed fwd)
When Stefani Germanotta was working as a waitress in the West Village in the summer of 2005 (anyone know where?), her coworker Malgorzata Saniewska shot a series of photos of her at Germanotta's parents' apartment.
A year or two later, Germanotta became Lady Gaga.
Well, not quite. But the specifications are quite impressive:
The headline specifications are a new 22.3 Megapixel full-frame sensor with 100-25600 ISO sensitivity (expandable to 102,400 ISO), 1080p video at 24, 25 or 30fps and 720p at 50 or 60fps, a 61-point AF system (with 41 cross-type sensors), 6fps continuous shooting, a viewfinder with 100% coverage, 3.2in screen with 1040k resolution, 63-zone iCFL metering, three, five or seven frame bracketing, a new three-frame HDR mode, microphone and headphone jacks and twin memory card slots, one for Compact Flash, the other for SD; the control layout has also been adjusted and the build slightly improved. So while the resolution and video specs remain similar to its predecessor, the continuous shooting speed, AF system, viewfinder, screen and build are all improved, and again there's the bonus of twin card slots.
DP Review and the Verge also have reviews and it's available for preorder on Amazon for, whoa, $3500 (the kit lens is $800 more)..
I've gotta get over to the MoMA to see the Eugene Atget exhibition. PDN has a selection of photos from the show.
ps. And Cindy Sherman!
What you may have heard: This new kind of camera from Lytro allows you to take pictures without worrying about focusing until after the photos have been taken.
What's totally cool that I didn't know until this morning when I followed a link to Heather Champ's Lytro photos: you can focus and refocus the photos on Lytro's web site as much as you want. What a fun thing! Try it out with Heather's photos or Lytro's default picture gallery.
Bill Eppridge photographed all sorts of people skateboarding in NYC in the '60s.
Taken by some of the world's most iconic photographers, a selection of the best photographs ever published in Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. Here's a photo of Mickey Mantle from 1965:
The caption reads:
In one of the most eloquent photographs ever made of a great athlete in decline, Yankee star Mickey Mantle flings his batting helmet away in disgust after another terrible at-bat near the end of his storied, injury-plagued career.
Mantle was only 33 when that photo was taken but he'd already had 13 extremely productive seasons under his belt and his last four seasons from '65 to '68 were not nearly as good.
Buzzfeed has a collection of every World Press Photo Contest winner from 1955 to the present. Some amazing photos but in general they do not paint a very kind picture of humanity.
Photographer Hana Pesut takes photos of couples wearing each other's clothes.
(via @JamesJM)
A list of all the winners of the 2012 World Press Photo Photo Contest. I'm not particularly fond of the overall winner but there's lots of great photography here.
I love these cauliflower explosions done by Brock Davis...you can find them in his Food Stuff set on Flickr. Here's the Challenger explosion in cauliflower:
(via @josephholmes)
Camera shutters used to be verrrry slow so to help young kids stay still during the long exposure, the photographer would have the mother be in the frame but typically covered by a blanket or cloth. Like so:
(via cup of jo)
For his new book, Tim Mantoani took hundreds of portraits of photographers posing with prints of their most well-known work. Here's Neil Leifer holding his photo of Ali standing over Liston.
(via sly oyster)
From photographer Steven Siegel, a reminder of what a magical shithole NYC was in the 1980s. Oh hey, here's a hole in the Manhattan Bridge walkway:
See also kids digging up graves in Greenwood Cemetary, the abandoned West Side Highway, and what looks like a bombed-out Bushwick. (via gothamist)
Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.
(via stellar)
Inspired by a video of a chain-smoking two-year-old from Indonesia, photographer Frieke Janssens took a series of portraits of kids smoking.
A video shows how Janssens made the photos...the cigarettes were made of cheese.
From The Verge, a new-ish tech site, a mega-guide on everything you need to know about buying a camera. It starts at the beginning with the basics of photography, goes over ISO, aperture, shutter speed, megapixels, white balance, and the major types of camera.
If you're new to digital photography, the three things you should acquaint yourself with first are the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The three work in concert, and if you can manipulate and control them all, you'll take fabulous photos without even touching the rest of your camera. Together, they're known as the Exposure Triangle, because they control how much light you're exposing the camera to (aperture), how sensitive the camera is to that light (ISO), and how long your exposure lasts (shutter speed).
I love everything about this...I scrolled through the entire list. This one was my favorite:
(via waxy)
In an excerpt from the introduction to Subway, his collection of photographs of the NYC subway, Bruce Davidson recalls how he came to start taking photos on the subway in the 1980s.
As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, and looked around to see who might be standing by, waiting to attack. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rode it knew this and was on guard at all times; a day didn't go by without the newspapers reporting yet another hideous subway crime. Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist-or a deranged person.
At the beginning of this video, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, announces calmly:
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Yeah, no biggie.
Dress like your favorite nerdy folk: Nerd Girlfriend is a companion site to the excellent Nerd Boyfriend.
Gothamist has some photos of the new Apple Store in NYC's Grand Central Terminal.
The company was obviously under tight constraints as to what they could do with the store (they would have loved to encase the whole thing in plexiglass probably), but from the looks of things, they did a marvelous job. There's so little styling -- the whole store is just tables and screens mostly -- that it looks like the Apple Store not only belongs there, but that it's been there forever, like Grand Central was designed with the Apple Store in mind. If you walk around Grand Central, not a lot of the other retail locations can say that, if any. (photo by katie sokoler)
In Focus delivers part one of an eventual three-part look at 2011 in photography. 2011 was a remarkably eventful year.
Here's part two. See also Buzzfeed's list of the 45 most powerful images of 2011.
Before he made movies, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer for Look magazine. Here are a selection of Kubrick's photos of New York City life in the 1940s, even then displaying his keen cinematic eye.
Prints are available. (thx, mark)
Ted Sabarese shot a photo series of people and the fish they look like.
(via ★swissmiss)
Over the past two years, the NYPD has been taking panoramic images of crime scenes in an attempt to better record the evidence.
Each panorama takes between 3 to 30 minutes to produce, depending on the available light, and is added to a database where detectives can access it. Before the switch to the Panoscan, crime scene images sometimes took days to process. Now, soon after the photos are posted, investigators can point and click over evidence from a scene that they might have missed in the hectic hours after the crime.
I wish these were bipartisan, but this suprisingly large collection of prominent Republicans made up with clown paint is still pretty amazing. Here's Texas governor Rick Perry:
Over at In Focus, Alan Taylor has a selection of submissions from the upcoming National Geographic photo contest. Some really beauties in ther...whoa, UFO!
New from Lomography: the Lomokino, a movie camera that can shoot a 144-frame movie on any 35mm film. And you hand-crank it! Here's a sample:
Gothamist has a collection of photos of the abandoned train platform underneath the Waldorf=Astoria.
Over the weekend we had a chance to visit the long-abandoned Waldorf-Astoria train platform, which allowed VIPs to enter the hotel in a more private manner -- most famously it was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, possibly to hide the fact that he was in a wheelchair suffering from polio. The mysterious track, known as Track 61, still houses the train car and private elevator, which were both large enough for FDR's armor-plated Pierce Arrow car. Legend has it that the car would drive off the train, onto the platform and straight into the elevator, which would lead to the hotel's garage.
Photos by Sam Horine.
Bill Cunningham New York, the documentary on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, is available to watch on Hulu for free. (US-only probably.)
Matthew Porter's photo composite Empire on the Platte is arresting.
Pairs nicely with Melissa Gould's Neu-York, "an obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II".
In 1942, Life magazine speculated about what an Axis invasion of North America might look like.
The worst floods in 50 years have hit Thailand Bangkok...the Big Picture has photos of the flooding in Bangkok while In Focus has a collection from all over Thailand.
James Kendall's wife's 90-year-old grandmother recently cleaned out her pantry and Kendall documented some of the ancient foodstuffs lurking within.
(via @lomokev)
What's this then? Jovian moon? Instagrammed photo of Earth taken from the ISS? Head of a nail?
Nope, it's actually a well-worn frying pan from a project by Christopher Jonassen.
Sam Gellman visited North Korea as a tourist earlier this month and returned with some nice photos. This shot is from the Mass Games but there are also many street scenes depicted.
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
(via stellar)
This is one of my favorite Flickr photos:
This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.
Adrian Fisk recently traveled through China asking the young people there to write anything they wanted down on a piece of paper. The results are interesting.
"After watching television I have many ideas, but am unable to realize them." Yunnan, Luo Zheng Chui, 30 years old, farmer.
"I'd like to see any supernatural thing such as alien, UFO, mysterious thing." Chan Jie Fang, 28 years old, supervisor in bag making company in Guangdong province but learning English in Guangxi province.
"We are the lost generation. I'm confused about the world." Guangxi, Avril Lui, 22-years-old, post-grad student.
More are available on Fisk's site (click on New Stories and then Ispeak China). (via @bryce)
Watch as Vladimir Putin rides a horse, drives a race car, tags a tiger, does judo, goes on archeological dives, looks at leopards, stands on a boat, arm wrestles, attempts to bend a frying pan, rides a snowmobile, flies a plane, hugs a dog, rides a motorcycle, looks at a bear, swims the butterfly, signs autographs, shoots a whale with a crossbow, plays the piano, feeds a moose, talks with a biker gang, steers a boat, walks through brush with a gun, sits in a tank, blacksmiths, plays hockey, hugs a horse, dives almost a mile in a submersible, and adjusts sunglasses.
He has made many more important posts on In Focus and Big Picture over the years, but Alan Taylor has really outdone himself with this one...each photo is somehow more wonderfully unlikely than the previous one. See also Kim Jong-il Looking at Things.
Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary film about the unassuming king of street fashion photography, is out on DVD today.
"We all get dressed for Bill," says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends he spots emerging from Manhattan sidewalks and high society charity soirees for his beloved Style section columns On The Street and Evening Hours.
Cunningham's enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. The range of people he snaps uptown fixtures like Wintour, Brooke Astor, Tom Wolfe and Annette de la Renta (who appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between reveals a delirious and delicious romp through New York. But rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as Bill, who lived a monk-like existence in the same Carnegie Hall studio at for fifty years, never eats in restaurants and gets around solely on bike number 29 (28 having been stolen).
It got great reviews...currently 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Cassini spacecraft caught this remarkable photo of Saturn eclipsing the Sun in 2006.
Click through for the big image and the massive image. If you look close can see the Earth in the image, for reals!
Cigars each have their own unique fingerprint of sorts as these cross-sectional photos attest.
(thx, frank)
A few things you might learn about photography by following Henri Cartier-Bresson's example.
4. Stick to one lens
Although Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with several different lenses while on-assignment working for Magnum, he would only shoot with a 50mm if he was shooting for himself. By being faithful to that lens for decades, the camera truly became "an extension of his eye".
Update: That link is having some trouble so here's the cached copy from Google.
Mastergram takes photos from well-regarded photographers (Capa, Burtynksy, Weegee, etc.) and runs them through Instagram filters.
If the Instagram effect can make mundane images appear to be works of art, what happens when we apply the same filters to images that have historically been held in high regard? Is the imagery degraded or enhanced as a result?
Ursus Wehrli is coming out with a new book, The Art of Clean Up, which features pairs of photographs of different objects, in disorder and then sorted. Here's my favorite pair:
Photos from the book are disappearing from various sites around the web as takedown notices are sent out, but you can get the gist of the book by watching this video by Wehrli about how one of the photos was made:
Ulric Collette's Genetic Portraits series features combined photos of family members (father/son, mother/daughter, etc.) that emphasize the facial similarities between them.
(via fresser)
This photo was taken by a camera made almost entirely out of Legos:
Even the lens is homemade; it's just plexiglass ground into shape with fine-grit sandpaper. I misunderstood: the lens is store-bought but the focusing screen is made of plexi. (via ★alexandra)
The award for the most creative wedding photos goes to Juliana Park and Benjamin Lee.
They start out kinda ordinary but stick with it. (via mlkshk)
Where Children Sleep is a book of photographs by James Mollison of kids and the rooms they sleep in.
The caption for the photo above is: "Joey, 11, killed his first deer at the age of 7. He lives with his family in Kentucky." The diversity in living environments is amazing. (via lens)
From fashion designer Hedi Slimane's photoshoot with Cobain. She's 18 now. The time, where did it go?
AP photographer David Guttenfelder was recently granted "unprecedented access" to locations in North Korea...In Focus has a selection of the photos he took.
A short and charming documentary about fashionable seniors who are very much young-at-heart.
I'm not ready for a convent or anything, so I can wear leopard glasses.
If you like that, check out the portraits on Advanced Style, which is like a Sartorialist for the AARP set.
The Telegraph has a great photo gallery of divers' faces as they compete in diving world championships in Shanghai.
(via ★antimega)
Photographer Joao Silva lost his legs last October when a land mine exploded under him in Afghanistan. Today, he's back at work with a photo on the front page of the NY Times.
Although Mr. Silva can walk, he still needs a cane, which he holds in his right hand. When he wants to shoot, he must transfer the cane to his left arm so he can pick up the camera. He also conceded that he was frustrated about not yet being able to move as nimbly as he once could. But all in all, he said he was happy with his first day's work.
"It was a matter of making the best of what I had," he said. "There will come a time when I can run, but now I can walk."
These color photos taken of London during WWII's Battle of Britain are great.
Alan Taylor recently covered the Battle of Britain over at In Focus as well...I love this "business as usual" photo.
This is a macro photo of...what do you think this is?
Click through to find out and see more macro photos from Caren Alpert.
Wow. So remember the photo taken by the monkey and Techdirt's subsequent musings about who owns the copyright a photo taken by a monkey? Today Techdirt is reporting that Caters News Agency sent a takedown notice to Techdirt asking them to remove the monkey's photos. Totally not making this up.
We were a bit surprised to receive a notice on Monday from Caters News, telling us they represented David Slater with respect to the syndication of those photos, and asking us to take down the photos. The notice was not a DMCA takedown notice. It doesn't even mention copyright, though that seems like the only basis upon which they would make such a takedown request. And, to be clear, it was not in the least bit threatening. There is no legal language and no threat at all in the note.
When asked for clarification by Techdirt, a representative from Caters replied:
Michael, regardless of the issue of who does and doesn't own the copyright -- it is 100% clear that the copyright owner is not yourself. You have blatantly 'lifted' these photographs from somewhere -- I presume the Daily Mail online. On the presumption that you do not like to encourage copyright theft (regardless of who owns it) then please remove the photographs.
Onionesque. Please someone interview the monkey about his/her views on this.
Alan Light got himself invited to the Academy Awards in 1989 with full access privileges...he took along a camera and shot dozens of candid photos of celebrities on the red carpet, at rehersals, and at after-parties. Here are Drew Barrymore and Corey Feldman arriving:
Barrymore, 14, and Feldman, 17, were dating at the time. At this point, Barrymore had been in rehab twice for drugs/alcohol and is two months away from a failed suicide attempt. Light also got photos of Lucille Ball a month before she died, Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers, Mayim Bialik, Jodie Foster (who won the Best Actress Oscar that year for The Accused) and, my favorite for some reason, River Phoenix.
From earlier this month at In Focus, a photographic look at the "dizzying inspiration and crushing disappointment" of NASA's Space Shuttle program. (via @robinsloan)
I almost made a joke on this post about getting a takedown notice from the monkey who took the inlined image, but this story on Techdirt explores the copyright issues involved in a more serious way.
Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to take your photo, technically that stranger holds the copyright on the photo, though no one ever enforces this.
(via ★tcarmody)
Even though several photographers have done similar projects (e.g. Denis Darzacq), these levitating self-portraits by Natsumi Hayashi charmed the pants right off of me.
Forget the million monkeys at a million typewriters eventually pounding out Shakespeare. Watch out Cartier Bresson (or perhaps Jill Greenberg), they've moved on to photography. A crested black macaque grabbed a photographer's camera and shot dozens of shots, including this fine self-portrait:
I think that is my new favorite photo by my new favorite photographer.
Anna Skladmann takes photographs of the children of rich Russian families.
When I came to photograph Eva, she was at home with her two nannies, one British and one Russian. She had planned everything in advance: the dress she had chosen hung already perfectly ironed and pressed with matching tights and shoes carefully next to it. I felt that I had been hired by Eva to do this shoot rather than the other way around. She was experienced and knowledgeable as she showed me the rooms we were allowed to photograph. She placed herself carefully on the edge of a couch, stood in front of her favorite painting, and posed in her parents' library. At the end of this photo session she was exhausted and lay down on the sofa. Finally I was able to take the only photograph that I had composed myself.
A photo restorer walks through the process of restoring a tintype photograph from the 1870s.
My standard operating procedure is to use an ultra-high resolution camera combined with a top-of-the-line macro lens to photograph tintypes. I use strobe lights to illuminate the artwork. Strobes produce "hard" light, much like the sun on a clear day. In addition to the strobes, I place a polarizer over the camera lens and polarizer gels over the strobe lights. This eliminates all reflections and enables the camera to pick up a greater tonal range along with more detail.
The original photo is on the left and an intermediate step on the right; you'll need to click through to see the finished product.
Update: This is a better restoration...the one above is too airbrushed, like the photo on the cover of a fashion magazine.
A lovely collection of self portraits by Vivian Maier.
Maier, you'll recall, is the street photographer whose photos were discovered at a Chicago thrift store in 2007.
A bunch of street level panoramas of midtown Manhattan from 1982. 1982 has never seemed so long ago. This link has been up and down for the past two weeks so it may not be available, so bookmark it for later checking-out.
As part of his new-ish gig as editor of In Focus at The Atlantic, Alan Taylor is running a 20-week series of photo essays on World War II. The first essay, Before the War, has been posted and is excellent.
The years leading up to the declaration of war between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939 were tumultuous times for people across the globe. The Great Depression had started a decade before, leaving much of the world unemployed and desperate. Nationalism was sweeping through Germany, and it chafed against the punitive measures of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. China and the Empire of Japan had been at war since Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in 1931. Germany, Italy, and Japan were testing the newly founded League of Nations with multiple invasions and occupations of nearby countries, and felt emboldened when they encountered no meaningful consequences. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, becoming a rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming World War -- Germany and Italy supported the nationalist rebels led by General Francisco Franco, and some 40,000 foreign nationals traveled to Spain to fight in what they saw as the larger war against fascism.
(thx, david)
Peter Langenhahn will take hundreds of photos at a sporting event and stitch them together to make a single time-compressed panorama of the event's action, like this image of every foul committed during a soccer match. Here's a short video showing how he does it.
See also Peter Funch's composite NYC street scenes. (via petapixel)
There's a great thread over at Quora with photos of famous people in unexpected places, situations, or company. For example, there's a photo of a young Bill Clinton meeting John F. Kennedy and one of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla hanging out. My two favorites are a photo of Tank Man captured from an unusual angle and a chilling photo of John Wilkes Booth at Lincoln's second inauguration, taken a little over a month before he killed Lincoln.
See also awesome people hanging out together. (thx, david)
No idea what these have to do with business or being inside business or whatever, but Business Insider has a nice selection of photos by Danny Lyon of Brooklyn in 1974.
Textify.it is a web app that uses text to make alphabetic pointillist representations of images. I turned a photo of the Most Photographed Barn in America into this:
It's also available as an iOS app. (via prosthetic knowledge)
A great collection of behind-the-scenes shots from famous movies. Here's Kubrick and Sellers on the set of Dr. Strangelove:
(via df)
Paragliding photographer George Steinmetz takes beautiful aerial photos of Africa and other places from what is basically a chair attached to a motor and parachute.
Steinmetz was the subject of a New Yorker profile last year.
I found this photo of Alfred Hitchcock with three children here labeled "Alfred Hitchcock and his kids" but since he only had one child and looks older in the photo, I assume those are actually his three granddaughters, Mary, Tere, and Katie.
Anyway, lots of other rarely seen celebrity photos here, including a few fakes -- notably the JFK/Monroe one done by Alison Jackson -- an unheartthrobby George Clooney as a teen, and Hitler's baby picture. (via ★genmon)
There's a rock at the main intersection of White Rock, New Mexico that's often repainted, sometimes two or three times a day. My pal Mouser and a couple friends of his took a core sample of the rock to determine the paint thickness...turns out there was five and a half inches of paint on that rock. Here's a composite photomicrograph of the paint layers.
LeafSnap is a new iPhone app that uses facial recognition techniques to identify trees based on photos of their leaves.
Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.
Wow. Garden Design has more info. (thx, claire)
The recent uploads by your contacts is the most important page on Flickr and it's broken. Timoni West is a designer at Flickr and she wrote a brief post on that page's problems.
The page fails on a fundamental level -- it's supposed to be where you find out what's happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.
The page isn't just outdated, it's actively hurting Flickr, as members' social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don't come back.
Many of my friends have switched their photo activities to Instagram and, more recently, Mlkshk. And Flickr's broken "what's new from your friends" page is to blame. Both of those sites use a plain old one-page reverse-chronological view of your friends' photos...just scroll back through to see what's going on. The primary advantage of that view is that it tells a story. Ok, it's a backwards story like Memento, but that kind of backwards story is one we're increasingly adept at understanding. The Flickr recent uploads page doesn't tell any stories.
As long as we're talking about what's wrong with Flickr -- and the stories thing comes in here too -- the site is attempting to occupy this weird middle ground in terms of how people use it. When Flickr first started, it was a social game around publishing photos. You uploaded photos to Flickr specifically to share them with friends and get a reaction out of them. As the service grew, Flickr became less of a place to do that and more of a place to put every single one of your photos, not just the ones you wanted friends to see. Flickr has become a shoebox under the bed instead of the door of the refrigerator or workplace bulletin board. And shoeboxes under beds aren't so good for telling stories. A straight-up reverse-chron view of your friends' recent photos probably wouldn't even work on Flickr at this point...you don't want all 150 photos from your aunt's trip to Kansas City clogging up the works. Instagram and Mlkshk don't have this problem as much, if at all. (via @buzz)
The caption says that this is a photo. My brain is having a difficult time agreeing.
(via stellar)
Murray Howe travelled around Europe in 1909 and these photos of Moscow uploaded to Flickr by his great grandson.
Howe was arrested and detained several times in Russia and Germany for taking unauthorized photographs but still managed to bring his entire collection of photos home with him.
Two hundred and fifty thousand troops were in formal review before the Kaiser. Suddenly a tall, sloping shouldered foreigner stepped into the open, leveled his graflex and snapped it. "Take me to the official photographer," he suggested, when, the next instant, astounded sword bearers fell upon him from every quarter.
A few minutes later, he had the official picture maker deep in an enthusiastic conversation over some prints showing his work on another day, when foggy weather had foiled the official camera.
After that, it was merely human nature for the Kaiser's photographer to have his Yankee friend released, and gracefully to exchange prints with him.
Over at In Focus, Alan Taylor posted a collection of nuclear weapons testing photos. You've probably seen some of these before, but they're still worth a look. The photos of the French Polynesian tests are scarily beautiful.
This photo was taken recently by Sergey Ponomarev in Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan:
The line on the wall is the high water mark from the March 11 tsunami and the time on the clock is when the water crested (Wikipedia puts the max readings right around 15:20 local time). Each element alone is documentation of a thing...together they tell a story.
I have a soft spot for storytelling clocks in photos. Joseph Koudelka's 1968 photo of the empty streets of Prague before the Soviet crackdown of The Prague Spring is one of my favorite photos. And obviously I love the photo taken by my wife of me holding my son Ollie when he was exactly 20 mintues old. It was the first time I'd held him and oh crap I'm crying at work again... (via in focus)
From the NY Times Lens blog, a photo essay by Diana Markosian featuring a Ukrainian town near Chernobyl where only five families remain; the rest of the 1000 original residents evacuated after the disaster 25 years ago.
But life can be grim and lonely. Twenty-five years ago, Ms. Masanovitz was a nurse. Her husband was a farmer on a collective farm. Now he spends his time drinking.
While she was photographing the couple one day, Ms. Markosian watched as Ms. Masanovitz picked up the phone in astonishment. It was the first time it had worked in a year.
More photos are available on Markosian's web site. (via @hchamp)
In the late 70s, Anton Perich built something resembling an inkjet printer to make large-scale paintings like this:
The photography section of Perich's web site is also worth a look...lots of photos of the Warholish NYC scene in the 70s and 80s: Warhol, Jagger, Mapplethorpe, John Waters, etc. (via today and tomorrow)
The WVIL (Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) is a concept camera that uncouples the lens from the viewfinder. Here's a 60-second demo:
I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to make something similar to control a dSLR with an iPhone app via Bluetooth. (via ★pb)
In December 1952, a thick smog settled over London for several days. This was a particularly bad episode of the London Fog, which was hardly a natural occurrence...the "fog" was mostly due to the burning of soft coal. It is now thought that the Great Smog resulted in around 12,000 deaths.
Here's a collection of photos of the smog, including this daytime shot.
That dim greyish-orange ball in the sky is the Sun.
Great series of photos of a Harlem store front, taken every 2-5 years from 1977 to 2004. (via ★vuokko)
Update: These photos were taken by Camilo Jose Vergara; there are many more like them at his web site. (thx, andrew)
Cute baby animal pix are fine for your daily squee! but for some real gravitas, check out these photos of elderly animals by Isa Leshko.
Photographer Isa Leshko is traveling to sanctuaries across the country to photograph animals that are elderly or at the end stage of their lives. "I began the series as a means of exploring my feelings about my mother's decline due to Alzheimer's Disease," she says. "As I've worked on this project, though, I've come to realize that these images are a testament to survival and endurance. And they raise questions about what it means to be elderly."
As part of his inventor portrait series, David Friedman profiled Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera.
Someone at Yahoo Answers posted the first page of Infinite Jest with the title "First page of my book. what do you think?" The crowd was not impressed:
No discernible voice/tone in this writing. Rambling descriptions. I, frankly, do not care where each and every person is seated. I don't care what shoe you're wearing. If you take out all the unnecessary details, you'd be left with about seven words.
See also what happens when a photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson gets critiqued on Flickr.
so small
so blurry
to better show a sense of movement SOMETHING has to be in sharp focus
(thx, timothy)
Stephan Tillmans' Luminant Point Arrays project is a collection of photographs of tube television screens as they're switched off.
(via ★buzz)
What a great idea...Noah Kalina, Adam Lisagor, William Wilkinson, and Oliver White made an iPhone app that helps you remember to take a daily photo of yourself inspired by Noah's Everyday project.
Watch closely for the Noah Durden character...
Designer Jessica Walsh shares the photo setup she uses to document her work.
I cobbled together this set up out of the desire to properly archive my design work. Next thing I knew I started getting paid for it, and it became an integral part of my work. I am simply listing my equipment and a little bit about what I know to get some designers started in figuring out the best way to shoot their own work.
You can see the gorgeous results in her portfolio.
Over at The Atlantic's In Focus blog, Alan Taylor is compiling a selection of photos of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. You've seen many of these on other sites, but not at these sizes (1280 pixels wide).
Color photographs of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition by Frank Hurley.
Early in 1915, their ship 'Endurance' became inexorably trapped in the Antarctic ice. Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915.
(via @polarben)
You've likely already seen this, but 9-eyes is a better-than-usual collection of images taken from Google Street View.
For her Photo Opportunities project, Corrine Vionnet finds tourist photos of famous landmarks online and layers them to make images like this:
(thx, reed)
But we've got to wait a whole year...the exhibition opens on Feb 26, 2012.
The MoMA retrospective will be thematic. There will be rooms devoted to Ms. Sherman's explorations of subjects like the grotesque, with images of mutilated bodies and abject landscapes, as well as a room with a dozen centerfolds, a takeoff of men's magazines, in which she depicts herself in guises ranging from a sultry seductress to a vulnerable victim. There will also be a room that shows her work critiquing the fashion industry and stereotypical depictions of women.
Today only, Amazon has Adobe Lightroom on sale for $189, 37% off the regular $300 price. I'm an Aperture user myself, but I've heard from many that Lightroom is superior.
Alan Taylor, late of The Big Picture, is up and running at The Atlantic with his new site, In Focus.
In Focus is The Atlantic's news photography blog. Several times a week, I'll post entries featuring collections of images that tell a story. My goal is to use photography to do the kind of high-impact journalism readers have come to expect on other pages of this site. Along the way, I'll cover a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low. Sometimes, I'll just showcase amazing photography.
I am a sucker for aerial photos and Gerco De Ruijter's photos of Dutch tree nurseries are particularly nice.
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