Omar Little Richardson

For the ten of you who watch The Wire *and* know who Terry Richardson is, this is for you.

Beautiful Art Deco camera

This handsome fellow is the Kodak Bantam Special, a limited-edition camera from 1936.

Manufactured by Kodak, designed by Teague. (via monoscope)

David Maisel's aerial photography

God, I am such a sucker for aerial photography. David Maisel has some especially fine examples: The Mining Project, The Forest, The Lake Project, Terminal Mirage, and Oblivion.

The One Who Got Away

Another fantastic feature from Pictory: The One Who Got Away features lost loves, hard choices, and former friends.

My friend and I grew up together: went through big losses early, endured school, survived through everything. This is her writing her final essay for law school, in late summer. I used to love this photo because it meant that we made it, at last. Then, after she became a lawyer, she helped my neighbor sue my family. We just got the letter from her, no warning. If I try hard, I understand her point of view. Business is business. As another good friend said: Welcome to adult issues.

A new kind of beauty

Photographer Phillip Toledano explores the concept of human beauty at a time when people, through surgery and drugs, are able to re-make themselves.

Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?

NSFW.

World Press Photo 2010 winners

The winning photographs in the 2010 World Press Photo Contest.

Overcoming creative block

A number of designers, artists, and photographers share how they combat creative block. One solution begins:

Slice and chop 2 medium onions into small pieces.
Put a medium sized pan on a medium heat with a few glugs of olive oil.
Add the onions to the pan, and a pinch of salt and pepper.

From the blog of Terry Richardson

Celebrity photographer Terry Richardson has a blog to which he posts quick snaps. Sorta like everyone else on the planet except that oh, there's Kate Moss and there's Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and there's Justin Theroux and there's Doutzen Kroes and there's Tracy Morgan.

Somewhat NSFW in places.

Found functions

Photographs of curves found in nature and the graphs and functions that go with them.

(via snarkmarket)

Right side upside down

A collection of upside down faces presented as if they were right side up.

I like best the ones where the hair doesn't give it away and you have to look to the cheeks or the eyes for evidence of upside down-ness. (via @brainpicker)

US National Archives on Flickr Commons

The US National Archives have added a number of photos to the Flickr Commons project. Flickr is quietly building the greatest collection of historical documents on the web.

Vans, vans, vans

Photos of vans and the places where they were. Suddenly, I want a van. (via matt)

The world's tallest building, out of time

Martin Becka and Cedric Delsaux are a pair of photographers who feature Burj Dubai in their work. Becka's Burj comes from his Dubai, Transmutations project in which he uses the photogravure processing technique to make images of brand-new Dubai that look as though they were taken in 1880.

Delsaux's Burj image comes from a project called The Dark Lens, which features images of Star Wars characters populating the circa-2008 Earth. I believe that's the Millennium Falcon docking at the Burj:

Many more of The Dark Lens images are available on Delsaux's site.

Garry Winogrand interview

A 1970 interview with photographer Garry Winogrand on how he's not trying to say anything with his work. Instead, he sets up photographic challenges for himself, which he then attempts to solve.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA

Upcoming at MoMA: a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs -- and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA's retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson's entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.

After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.

The fake colors of Hubble photography

Those wildly colorful Hubble telescope photos...how do they get them to look like that?

The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye.

See also this informative Reddit thread.

Color photo of The Beatles in 1957

Well, not so much The Beatles as The Quarrymen, a band formed by John Lennon and some schoolmates that was the precursor to The Beatles. (via @brainpicker)

On the moon without being on the moon

Vincent Fournier has made a series of photos of astronauts training and of the interiors of the Chinese, Russian and US space agencies.

Looks alien, doesn't it?

American Pixels

American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:

ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.

2000 / 2010

Rachel Loshak is posting two photos a day on her A Year in the Day - 2010 blog; one taken in 2000 and one taken in 2010. The juxtaposition, as they say in the art world, is interesting. (via @ironicsans)

The Office intern's photo blog

Ryan (the intern) from The Office has a photo blog.

Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.

William S. Burroughs' stuff

The apartment that American writer William S. Burroughs inhabited while he lived in New York has been preserved since his death in 1997. Photographer Peter Ross took some photos of some of the contents, including a worn pair of shoes, some nunchucks, and a book called Medical Implications of Karate Blows.

Well, I bet I'll go through half a dozen iPhones in the time it would have taken Burroughs to resole those shoes. That makes me feel greedy, wasteful, and self-indulgent. Maybe I'd be better off keeping the modern world out. Maybe we all would. Let's all just grab our nunchucks, put on our shoes and hat and walk the streets of Manhattan.

Biosphere 2 in decline

Photographer Noah Sheldon took a series of photos of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. BLDGBLOG has more info.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature -- wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings" -- and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.

Paris, 1962

Images from Paris cafes and nightlife in 1962, the same week Yves St. Laurent's runway show vaulted Dior to new heights. Many scenes around Les Halles (which no longer exists as it did then).

From the collection, a photo of some Les Halles butchers enjoying a drink at Au Pied de Cochon:

Update: As Wikipedia notes, Saint Laurent's fabled show took place in 1958; Dior was gone from Dior by '62. Not sure whether the caption is wrong or the photos are really from 1958. (thx, alex)

The future of photography, circa 1944

In 1944, Popular Photography magazine asked several people, including photographers Berenice Abbott and László Moholy-Nagy, to speculate about the future of photography.

Their opinions differ. Yet somehow all seem to feel that the second hundred years will see the camera put to use as never before with the amateur often leading the way.

Skiing the Air Force Memorial

There was so much snow in the DC area this weekend that Rob Story decided to make fresh tracks down the slope of the Air Force Memorial.

Top 10 astronomy photos of 2009

One of the better lists out there: the top astronomy photos of the year. From the list, this is a more detailed view of the Martian landscape than we're used to seeing:

My personal favorite, the photos taken by the LRO of Apollo 11's landing site, made the list as well.

Ansel Adams' Lost Los Angeles

While looking for something else at the Los Angeles Public Library, Gerard Van der Leun stumbled across some 1940s photos of LA taken by Ansel Adams. They had not been seen for a long while.

So I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.

Hubble goes deep

In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope took an image called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; basically astronomers pointed the Hubble toward an "empty" part of space and took a long-exposure shot in the visible spectrum. What they found were thousands of far away galaxies from early in the development of the universe. Now the Hubble has peered even deeper into the universe in near-infrared and captured this image:

Each one of those little specks is an entire galaxy, some only 600 million years old. Here's a zoomed-in section:

Portraits of power

At a United Nations meeting in September, New Yorker staff photographer Platon took photos of as many world leaders as her could get his hands on. Here's a slideshow of the results.

What did the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ask the photographer before the shutter clicked? "Platon," he said, "make me look good."

Vogue Italia does Twitter fashion shoot

The December 2009 issue of Vogue Italia has a spread of photos taken by Steven Meisel presented in the style of Twitpic.

That's Viktoriya Sasonkina; also represented are Karlie Kloss, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Gisele Bundchen.

Cities, before and after

Oobject has a collection of before-and-after photographs of cities, most of which have been hit by bombs (economic or otherwise): Hiroshima, Dubai, Warsaw.

Dubai, goodbye

Photos of Dubai in decline are the new photos of Detroit in decline.

Scenes from a contest

For today's installment of The Big Picture, Alan picked a selection of photos from National Geographic's International Photography Contest. I am a sucker for pictures of waves:

Photo is by Aaron Feinberg.

God, I love Cate Blanchett

Photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue, December 2009. (via djacobs)

Bird photos

Andrew Zuckerman's photos of birds are flat-out incredible.

That handsome fellow is the African Fish Eagle. The images are collected in a book called Bird.

A perpetual loop of seduction

The landing page for Natalie Daoust's Tokyo Girls project (sorry no direct link because of Flash) presents you with a grid of 45 small animated photos of women performing stripteases.

It is kinda mesmerizing. NSFW. (via swissmiss)

The fall of the Iron Curtain in pictures

I'm sure there will be many of these published today. Send me more if you run across any and I'll add them to the list.

Photos by Peter Turnley taken in Romania, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, and Hungary, most of them in late 1989.

Update: Pictures from a Vanished Country by Magnum's Thomas Hoepker.

Earlier this year I realized we would celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I went back into my archive and discovered that I had boxes full of negatives that I had never seen before, taken in East Germany over the past 50 years. It was a treasure which had to be unearthed.

(thx, bojan)

Update: The Berlin Wall: Rise and Fall, photos from Life magazine.

Mediabistro has collected video of how the news was reported on American television.

Update: The Big Picture weighs in: The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone.

The NY Times asked their readers to submit photos of the Wall: The View From the Wall.

The Times also has some nice split-screen photos of before and after the Wall fell. (thx, mau)

Photos from Poland in the 1980s. (thx, tomek)

From the WSJ: Wall's Rise and Fall. (thx, paul)

How an American soldier is made

The Denver Post followed high school graduate Ian Fischer as he enlisted in the Army, went through training, left for Iraq, and returned home; the photos tell quite a story.

Princess Leia and stunt double sunbathing on Tatooine

This did unsurprisingly well when I posted it to Twitter, so I've archived it here for posterity. This is Carrie Fischer and her stunt double taking a nap under the Tatooine suns during the filming of Jedi.

Something different is afoot at the Circle K

Paho Mann takes photos of Circle K convenience stores that have since transformed into other businesses.

The slow individualization of re-inhabited Circle Ks caused by years of choices and actions caught my attention. These buildings do not show a linear progression of the corporatization and homogenization of suburbia, but rather serve as evidence of a more circular system -- a system driven by a delicate negation between same and different, between complicated sets of actions and choices that shape our built environment.

(via do)

Little boxes, all the same?

Julia Baum took photos of suburban homes in Santa Clara, CA that were all built from the same architectural plan.

As I take a second look at these neighborhoods, I've found vast differences in what was once a uniform typology. Over the past 50 years these Houses have transformed from modest white cubes into a vibrant display of personality and present a rebellion against conformity.

This one is *really* happy. (via conscientious)

Levi's (sponsored by America)

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading a few lines from his poem, America. You may recognize the recording from its use in Levi's new ad campaign:

I thought for sure that Ryan McGinley had directed this and the O Pioneers! commercial but it turns out he just (just!) did the photos for the print campaign. (via slate)

Update: The audio clip used in that commercial might not be Whitman after all. From the inbox:

The Walt Whitman recording that is being used by the Levi's commercial that you posted on the 28th is actually not Whitman, and is now considered by most audio archivists to be a hoax.

More information about this most interesting recording can be found in Vol. X, No. 3 of Allen Koenigsberg's Antique Phonograph Monthly magazine from 1992, pages 9-11.

Among things pointed out, one is that the speech on the soundtrack ends with the quote, "Freedom Law and Love," whereas the original printed version of the poem ends with "Chair'd in the adamant of Time."

Koenigsberg also points out that Whitman's last years were chronicled on a daily basis by his personal secretary, and being wheelchair-bound, such a visit for Whitman would have been difficult, unprecedented, and undoubtedly noted.

(thx, jack)

Twins triptych

T to B: The Olsen twins (photographer unknown), Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by Diane Arbus, the Grady twins from The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. (via hysterical paroxysm)

Flickr is made of people

You can tag people directly in Flickr photos now.

The glittery Big Bang

You say to me "light photos" and I say "zzzzz", but Alan Jaras' light patterns captured on film are probably what the universe looked like at an early age.

(via justin blanton)

Those great (staged?) Great Depression photos

In his newest multipart essay for the NY Times, Errol Morris examines evidence of photo manipulations by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, including Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange. Were they dispassionate observers of American life in the 1930s or employees after a certain type of story?

If one can imagine the political animosity that would have been generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things.

Iconic photos

The Iconic Photos blog reminds me a bit of Letters of Note (and Footnotes of Mad Men). It's one notable photo per post plus some context.

Photographer's venn

A diagram that shows the overlap of street photography, fine art photography, and photojournalism.

Vivian Maier, recently discovered street photographer

Vivian Maier was a street photographer from the 1950s-70s in Chicago whose extensive body of work (40,000 negatives) was recently discovered at an auction. This blog is presenting that work to the public for (I think) the first time.

(thx, frank)

Update: Blake Andrews discusses some other photographers who came late to the public eye.

The other X factor in recognition is a curatorial champion. Bellocq had Friedlander. Atget had Abbot. Disfarmer had Miller. Without their discoverers, these photographers might still be anonymous. For Maier it's been John Maloof. An interesting mental experiment is to wonder what would've happened had Maier posted her own photos on a blog while still alive. Would they have the same impact? Or would they just be another series of old images from some self-promoting has-been?

Glaciers from space

Wired has a nice look at some glaciers as seen from space.

From the ground, glaciers can look like the Moon. And I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't tell you that: It's very cold. In spaaaace.

Popes, they don't make 'em like they used to

Used to be, back in my day, that new Popes were elected by a conclave of cardinals holed up in the Sistine Chapel burning unsuccessful ballots with a chemical compound that produces black smoke until a two-thirds majority is achieved, at which point the ballots are pierced with a needle and thread and burned, producing white smoke that the assembled masses take as a sign that the cardinals have chosen, and the Pope-elect is asked if he wants to be the Pope and, if so, what his Pope-name will be and then he chooses his papal garments from a selection of small, medium, and large -- *not* tall, grande, and venti as you might expect, that being Italy and all -- dons a ring, and is announced to the crowd in St. Peter's Square.

This new way seems much simpler.

Cool cats

Francis Wolff was an executive at Blue Note Records who also took tens of thousands of photos of the label's musicians.

A selection of Wolff's photos are available here and here.

Update: More photos.

From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome)

Wow. With PhotoSketch, you just draw a sketch, label each item, like so:

and then the system goes out, finds photos that match the sketched items and their labels, and automatically pastes it all together into one composite image:

The site is down right now but the paper is available for download and this video gives you a taste of how it works:

Again, wow. (via migurski)

Update: I've seen many references to Photosketch saying that it has to be fake (here's a sampling). But it's pretty obviously real. For one thing, here's the source code; try it out (Windows only). It was presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009; here's the listing of papers presented. The authors all have web pages on university sites and have published work using similar techniques and technology (Ping Tan and Ariel Shamir for example). And is what it does really that unbelievable? At the most basic level Photosketch is just find me a man that's sorta shaped like this, a dog that looks like this, and paste them together with a background that looks like this. That the results are so impressive (especially for a demo) is a testament to the team's execution and attention to the small details. Even if it turns out to be an elaborate hoax, I have no doubt that someone could actually build a working version of Photosketch...I mean, look at TinEye and Photosynth.

The most difficult photographs in nature

Outside magazine recently asked a handful of nature photographers to discuss the most difficult shots they ever captured. Philipp Engelhorn selected a photograph taken on the frozen tundra of China:

Winters in northern Xinjiang, China, rival those in Siberia: Forty below zero is normal. We'd gone in the fall to find an eagle hunter and make a handshake deal to follow him. But when we actually showed up two months later, he told us he never expected us to return and had no time for us. So we did the worst thing ever and set out by horse-drawn sleigh across the frozen countryside to find an eagle hunter.

The images that accompany the article are incredible and make most day jobs look like an all-day pancake buffet.

The oldest living things in the world, photographed

Rachel Sussman has travelled the world to take photographs of the oldest living things in the world. This is actinobacteria from Siberia; it's 400,000 years old.

There's a map and a progress blog and an unassociated Wikipedia entry that tells of the ocean-going species Turritopsis nutricula:

The Hydrozoan species Turritopsis nutricula is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again. This means that there may be no natural limit to its life span.

Who wants to bet that Ray Kurzweil drinks a Turritopsis nutricula smoothie every morning? (via @bobulate)

A little Grace Kelly

I love this shot of a woman in Milan from the Sartorialist.

As Schuman notes, there's a sense of style here that tons of expensive flashy clothes can't compete with.

Update: On the other hand, this sort of thing has its charms.

Early photorealism

At the end of the 19th century, Henry Harrison created color photographs by painting them on-site.

What do Stormtroopers do on their day off?

They play video games, dance, fish, hang out with Wall-E, and all kinds of other stuff. I can't decide which is my favorite...this one, this one, or this one? No, it's gotta be this one:

(via @ettagirl)

Is cropping a photo lying?

David Hume Kennerly took a photo of Dick Cheney and his family cooking a meal. Cheney is in the foreground on the right side of the frame, cutting some meat while some other family members chat and bustle in the background. Newsweek used the photo in their magazine, only they cropped out the family and just showed the former VP stabbing a bloody piece of meat with a knife to illustrate a Cheney quote about CIA interrogation methods. Kennerly cried foul.

The meat on the cutting board wasn't the only thing butchered. In fact, Newsweek chose to crop out two-thirds of the original photograph, which showed Mrs. Cheney, both of their daughters, and one of their grandchildren, who were also in the kitchen, getting ready for a simple family dinner.

However, Newsweek's objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek's choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

This is hardly photo fakery. Crops aren't lies. Full-frame photos aren't the truth. Kennerley himself could have easily taken that exact picture in the moment. A spokesman for Newsweek defended the magazine's action:

Yes, the picture has been cropped, an accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers since the invention of the medium. We cropped the photograph using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it. Is it a picture of the former vice president cutting meat? Yes, it is. Has it been altered? No. Did we use the image to make an editorial point -- in this case, about the former vice president's red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values? Yes, we did.

Given Cheney's reputation, the cropped photo of him is not an outlandish or biased depiction of the man...in fact, it's a pretty good visual metaphor of the former VP. If there's one thing that both Cheney's supporters and detractors can agree on, it's that he's a "red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated [defender] of his views and values".

I wonder what Errol Morris and Ricky Jay would make of this?

Update: Or maybe it is. (thx, frank)

The dashing young men of fashion (and Dumb Donald)

Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil Blog caught the lineup of models before they walked the runway for Thom Browne.

This photo alone could be the springboard for an entire novel.

Captive electricity

Dazzling work by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.

See also Peter Miller's Polariod experiments.

Update: Robert Buelteman uses electricity to take photos of flowers.

Boxers, before and after fights

From a series by Howard Schatz.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners

The Royal Observatory has announced the winners of its Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.

I had no idea that images this sharp and detailed could be taken with non-pro ground telescopes...particularly these shots of the Horsehead Nebula and the surface of the Moon. More winners listed here.

Update: Jonathan Crowe notes that the gear used to take these photos isn't cheap.

The winner's photo of the Horsehead Nebula (mpastro2001 also had a second photo in the top five) used a 12 1/2" Ritchey-Chretien telescope ($21,500) and an SBIG STL11000 camera ($7,195 and up) with an AO-L adaptive optics accessory ($1,795) on a Paramount ME mount ($14,500). Total cost for just the equipment mentioned here: $44,990.

Early color photography

The color photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who plied his trade in Russia in the early 1900s, is making the rounds online again. It's always worth a look. Prokudin-Gorskii made color photographs using a clever filtering system years before color photography would be widely available. As a result, his work goes on the list of things that seem contemporary but really aren't.

As Mike notes, I first linked to Prokudin-Gorskii's work more than 8 years ago (!!).

Update: Clayton James Cubitt reminded me that Prokudin-Gorskii took a color portrait of Leo Tolstoy in 1908. (thx, clayton)

MJ tshirts are the new Obama tshirt

A collection of Michael Jackson tribute shirts worn to the recent Spike Lee-hosted birthday party for Jackson.

Beach parkour in Kazakhstan

My pal Mouser is in Kazakhstan and took a bunch of photos of kids doing parkour on the beach. This shot is my favorite.

Will parkour eventually join soccer as one of the world's most egalitarian sports? You don't even need a homemade ball to play, just stuff to jump over, through, and off. The whole world's a course.

Helicopter taking off

This one is for Ollie:

(via today and tomorrow)

Always on cameras

Adam Lisagor notices that the iPhone 3GS camera might always be buffering images so that when you press that shutter button, you get the photo that you wanted, not the one delayed by slow software or a slow shutter. Adam's observation gives me the opportunity to trot out one of my recent favorite informational factoids about the super high-speed cameras used to capture jumping great white sharks:

In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Google Street View as documentary photography

An assessment: what sort of photographer is the Google Street View car?

Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality -- as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

Models with no makeup

Tired of retouched women in magazines looking like "objects from Mars", photographer Peter Lindbergh captured eight models without makeup or excessive retouching for Harper's Bazaar's September issue. (via fashionologie)

2003 blackout photos

The NY Times' Lens blog has a visual look back at the blackout of 2003.

Men at their most masculine

The Morning News has an interview with Chad States about his series of photographs of Men at Their Most Masculine. Some of the photos are NSFW.

I found all my subjects through Craigslist. I began by asking the question "Are you masculine?" in the heading. In the body of the posting I talked briefly about the project. Much to the effect of: "I am doing a photography project on masculinity. If you identify as being masculine, please get back to me."

Masculinity seems to involve a lot of shirtlessness (and pantslessness). This one is kind of amazing.

"I am masculine because I abandon women after taking their love. Because when you study Freud, you don't let him study you. Because I study philosophy, not literature."

More of States' masculinity photos can be found on his web site.

The mighty flat mountains

I love JK Keller's Tatamount project.

Photographs of mountains are computationally altered to flatten the mountain's elevations, while an ocean horizon is altered to mimic the mountain's original topography.

In the comments, he mentions that the effect is done with a combination of JavaScript and Photoshop...which I didn't even know was a thing. (via today and tomorrow)

Hiroshima, 64 years ago

In remembrance of the mass destruction of life and property due to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 64 years ago today, The Big Picture presents a typically excellent selection of photos.

Update: From Design Observer about a year ago, Hiroshima, The Lost Photographs.

Balloons gather

Man and nature conspire to create something that looks straight out of a Pixar film.

Worth viewing large. (via flickr blog)

Our three Suns

In early July, a photographer took a picture of what appears to be three Suns rising over Gdansk Bay in Poland.

The photographer insists that the effect was not created by the camera and was visible to the naked eye. The early consensus in the forums is that the photo was taken through a double-paned window.

The face of child beauty pageants

High Glitz is Susan Anderson's portrait series depicting "the extravagant world of child beauty pageants".

Hours of preparation are spent on each child's appearance, and her camera records it all in graphic detail. Children's pageants are a fascinating subculture, but more than anything they represent a strange microcosm of America itself. Our own values of beauty, success and glamour reflected in the dreams of thousands of young girls...

Sweet Jesus, I'm gonna have some nightmares tonight. Can't sleep, clown'll eat me, can't sleep, clown'll eat me... (via conscientious)

Update: Colby Katz has done a similar project. (thx, chris)

Yogurt container typologies

A pair of photographers have photographed all sorts of different yogurt containers in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies.

Cronkite in pictures

Photographer Jill Krementz has some nice photos up in remembrance of Walter Cronkite. I love the ones of him playing his daily tennis match with Andy Rooney.

Update: Esquire reprinted a 2006 interview with Cronkite.

I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago. Once you get started in television, people associate you with your physical appearance -- and that includes the mustache. So I can't shave it off now. If I did, I'd have to answer too much mail.

The giant Apollo 11 post

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 and Monday is the same for both the first Moon landing and the first walk on the surface. In this entry, I've collected some of the best resources on the web related to the anniversary...articles, historical documents, audio, video, transcripts, photos, and the like. Enjoy.

We Choose the Moon is tracking the activities of the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago. Very nicely done.

Housed on NASA's history site is a ton of resources about the Apollo 11 landing, including an annotated transript of the landing, which makes for really interesting reading. MP3 files are also available as are many, many video clips of the landing at the astronauts' time on the surface. Highlights: this video was shot out of the window of the lunar module from a height of 50,000 feet until one minute after touchdown and I've never seen Armstrong's first step on the Moon from this angle before.

For its July 21, 1969 issue, The NY Times used 96 pt. type to declare that MEN WALK ON MOON.

The landing was made four miles west of the aiming point, but well within the designated area. An apparent error in some data fed into the craft's guidance computer from the earth was said to have accounted for the discrepancy.

Suddenly the astronauts were startled to see that the computer was guiding them toward a possibly disastrous touchdown in a boulder-filled crater about the size of a football field.

Mr. Armstrong grabbed manual control of the vehicle and guided it safely over the crater to a smoother spot, the rocket engine stirring a cloud of moon dust during the final seconds of descent.

The Onion used larger type and took a more unadulterated and profane approach (love the video version).

John Noble Wilford, the Times journalist who wrote the front page story underneath the 96 pt. type -- "the biggest single story of my career" -- recounts his Apollo 11 experience and ponders the Apollo program's legacy in a great piece for the Times.

It then occurs to me that if Columbus and Capt. James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happens. Exploring is old, but instantaneous telecommunications is new and marvelous.

In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for radio waves to travel the 238,000 miles from Moon to Earth, each step by Armstrong and Aldrin is seen, and their voices heard, throughout the world they have for the time being left behind. In contrast to exploration's previous landfalls, the whole world shares in this moment.

The Apollo 11 mission in photographs: NASA Images is the comprehensive source for NASA photos of the Apollo 11 mission; the always excellent Big Picture has photos of the mission from a variety of sources; David Burnett shot photos of people watching the launch; Time looks at Apollo astronauts Now and Then; the NY Times collected photos from readers of their Apollo 11 moments; Life has several photo galleries: Buzz Aldrin Looks Back, Scenes From the Moon, Up Close With Apollo 11 (rare and never-published photos), and The World Watches; and Google's archive of Life magazine's Apollo 11 images.

A map of where Armstrong and Aldrin walked during their 2+ hours on the surface. That same map superimposed on a soccer pitch and on a baseball field. They didn't walk that far at all.

Explore the Apollo 11 landing site on Google Moon.

In piece published on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, Buzz Aldrin advocates not a return to the Moon but a mission to Mars with the objective of establishing a colony on the red planet.

Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America's future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.

Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet's surface.

Video of John F. Kennedy's "we choose to go to the Moon" speech given at Rice University on September 12, 1962. Fewer than 7 years later, Apollo 11 achieved the goal that Kennedy laid out in that speech.

In a piece for New Scientist, Linda Geddes writes about possible future lunar parks and how they might be preserved.

Around these [landing sites] are scattered smaller artefacts and personal items, such as Neil Armstrong's boots and portable life-support system, scientific instruments and their power generators -- and, of course, the iconic US flag which remains planted in the moon's surface. Then there are the footprints and rover tread paths. Despite the passing of the years, these remain carved into the dust because the moon has no wind or rain to wash them away.

Anthropologist P. J. Capelotti of Penn State University in Abington has mapped out five "lunar parks". These cover the areas where the majority of the artefacts are concentrated and could be used as a basis for future preservation efforts. "Nobody's saying that the whole moon has to be off limits, but as people are starting to make plans for tourism and mineral extraction, or for putting a base there, they just need to be aware of them and work around them."

Since returning from the Moon, Neil Armstrong has been less and less willing to speak in public about his Apollo 11 experience. For the 40th anniversary, Armstrong will not take part in the NASA event to commemorate the landing. His only appearance related to the anniversary will be a 15-minute lecture at a Smithsonian Institution event on Sunday night. I found this event on the National Air and Space Museum site...maybe that's it? If so, then Armstrong's lecture will be webcast live on the NASA TV site that evening.

Popular Science shares a list of ten things you didn't know about the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.

Moonwalk One is a documentary film about Apollo released in 1970 to little fanfare, even though it won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was commissioned by NASA but with so much Apollo activity and information happening in the late 60s and early 70s, no one was interested in distributing or seeing the film and it was soon forgotten. Recently, the only remaining 35mm print of the film was located under the director's desk, restored, and offered for sale on DVD in time for the 40th anniversary.

To get a feel of what it was like in the Soviet Union during the Apollo 11 mission, Scientific American interviewed Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. The reaction was somewhat more subdued than in other parts of the world.

Of course, you cannot have people land on the moon and just say nothing. It was published in all the newspapers. But if you remember [back then] when Americans spoke of the first man in space, they were always talking of "the first American in space" [not Yuri Gagarin]. The same feeling was prevalent in Russia. There were small articles when Apollo 11 was launched. Actually, there was a small article on the first page of Pravda and then three columns on page five. I looked it up again.

Eat Me Daily explores the food consumed on the mission.

The Apollo crew even dined on thermo-stabilized cheddar cheese spread and hot dogs during the moon mission, bringing at least a bit of America in July to the sterile flight craft. And yes, there was bacon - foreshadowing the current bacon craze, the first meal eaten by man on the moon was none other than bacon cubes, coated with gelatin to combat crumbs.

The issue of the New Yorker published just after the Moon landing is worth a look: much of the Talk of the Town section is devoted to the landing and there's also a Letter from the Space Center. (Subscribers only.)

The main NASA site has an interactive feature to explore the landing site and Eagle (Eagle was the name of the lunar module).

Finally, there's still some good stuff to be had on the old telly on Monday. The History Channel has As It Happened: Man on the Moon at 8pm ET:

This special takes viewers back to July 1969 to experience the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man's first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11's mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.

and Moonshot, a two-hour documentary about Apollo 11, at 9pm ET. Turner Classic Movies is airing a bunch of Moon-related movies all day, including A Trip to the Moon (a 12-minute film from 1902) at 8pm ET and the excellent For All Mankind (newly out on Criterion Blu-ray) at 8:15pm ET. The Discovery Channel has When We Left the Earth, a one-hour documentary on the mission, at 10pm ET. If none of that tickles your fancy, try episode 6 of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon (available for the insanely low price of $12 on Amazon) or In the Shadow of the Moon on DVD.

[If you enjoyed this post, you should post it to Twitter.]

Update: Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, writes that landing on the Moon killed NASA.

Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn't dawned on them since Kennedy's oration. What was this single combat stuff -- they didn't use the actual term -- really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable ... how far-seeing ... but why don't we just do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow?

July Moon is a forthcoming documentary about some lost NASA tapes. Surely not these NASA tapes?

The computer source code that ran Apollo 11's Command Module and Lunar Module has been released.

A recently discovered photo clearly shows Neil Armstrong's face on the Moon through his visor.

He was the first man to walk on the moon, taking that one giant leap for mankind -- yet most of the famous shots are of his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as it was Armstrong who manned the stills camera.

New Scientist overlaid the Apollo lunar excursion maps on top of cities in Google Earth. Neil and Buzz didn't even leave Trafalgar Square on their trip to the Moon.

Gradient jeans

I love this photo from JAK & JIL BLOG. The lighting, the clothes, and the person wearing them are all perfect. Do click through to see it larger.

An intuitive expression of liquid intelligence

Photographer Paul Graham writes about what's so easy:

It's simply a way of recording what you see -- point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that? And what's more, in this digital age, its free -- doesn't even cost you the price of film. It's so simple and basic, it's ridiculous.

and difficult about photography:

It's so difficult because it's everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now. It's the view of this pen in my hand as I write this, it's an image of your hands holding this book, Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it's right there, across the room -- there... and there. Then it's gone. You didn't photograph it, because you didn't think it was worth it. And now it's too late, that moment has evaporated.

Graham also describes photography as "an intuitive expression of liquid intelligence", which seems an apt expression of creativity in general. (via noah kalina)

Light tests

Light Test is a collection of light test snaps from photographers...most of them feature an assistant standing in for the actual subject.

Oddly compelling, perhaps because they're so candid in relation to the finished product.

Update: Obama!

The house that used to be there

From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses.

Photo is from Pruned. (via janelle)

Update: Medianeras, series of photos of "party walls" by José Antonio Millán. (via artifacting)

Audio of Weegee and Cartier-Bresson

Rare mp3s of Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about photography.

Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It's interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don't hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee's voice after Weegee visited Kubrick's set one day.

Yep, that's Strangelove, alright. (via conscientious)

Creepy puppet children

This might be the creepiest thing on the internet today: The Puppet Show, photos of real children modified to look like puppets.

Topless waitresses

Waiting Topless (NSFW) is a audio slideshow about a pair of waitresses who worked at the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop in the small town of Vassalboro, Maine.

"Yes, I am a topless waitress, but I'm just a regular normal person in society," Cunningham says. "I honestly don't think in this economy right that there is a job out there that would pay roughly the same."

The coffee shop recently burnt to the ground in a suspected arson.

Hey WSJ, where is Iran?

The Wall Street Journal's Photo Journal blog, the launch of which was inspired by The Big Picture, has posted exactly *zero* photos of what's going on in Iran right now in their "Pictures of the Day" feature. That strikes me as odd. In contrast, The Big Picture has posted three big entries dedicated to the elections.

Fallen Princesses

The Fallen Princesses project imagines Disney characters if their stories didn't end happily ever after.

As a young girl, growing up abroad, I was not exposed to Fairy tales. These new discoveries lead to my fascination with the origins of Fairy tales. I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues.

Not so Charming. (via avenues)

Immersion: Porn by Robbie Cooper

You may remember Robbie Cooper's projects Alter Ego (photos of gamers and their in-game avatars) and Immersion (kids filmed with an Interrotron while playing video games). Cooper's new project is like Immersion, except with people watching porn. The video stills can be found in the July issue of Wallpaper but an 18-minute video is available on their web site.

In a film of startling power and unsettling intimacy -- produced exclusively for wallpaper.com -- video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion developed. Be aware that this is not easy titillation and some of you may find the footage shocking. But the film does throw up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act.

NSFW because it turns out that watching people watching porn at the office is no easier to explain to your boss/co-workers than actually watching porn at the office.

This image is messing with my brain

Tim Walker for Hermes. (via andrea inspired)

Update: Walker likely took his inspiration from Philippe Ramette.

The tank man of Tiananmen

The NY Times Lens blog, which has been really good right from the start, has a great story today about the photographers who took the pictures of the man in the white shirt staring down the tanks in Tiananmen twenty years ago.

As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

I think his action captured peoples' hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

Update: The Lens story prompted photographer Terril Jones to share a previously unpublished photo he'd taken of the tank man from a unique angle.

Update: From Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

The thing is, Tank Commander is far more dangerous than Tank Man. Tank Man can simply be shot; most seem to believe that Tank Man was later executed, far out of sight of the international media. The regime survives if Tank Man dies, even if the death of Tank Man isn't the optimal outcome. The regime dies, however, if Tank Commander refuses to run over Tank Man. Eisenstein used the Odessa Steps to demonstrate the corruption of the Czarist regime, but the regime didn't die until the soldiers refused to shoot the demonstrators. The successor regime didn't die until Boris Yeltsin climbed on a tank in August 1991. While there's some mystery as to the fate of Tank Man, I don't doubt that the CCP found Tank Commander and put a bullet in the back of his head at the first opportunity.

Growing into womanhood

For his The Girl Studies project, Charlie White paired photographs of two groups of people becoming women in very different ways: teen girls and adult male-to-female transsexuals.

In the images in White's series, both figures are blossoming into womanhood, though each along a different path. As observers, however, we have been taught to view the subjects in much the same way: with sheer terror.

These are fascinating. (via bygone bureau)

Saddam's palaces

BLDGBLOG has an interview with photographer Richard Mosse about his new project called Breach. Mosse went to Iraq and photographed several of Saddam's old palaces, many of which are occupied by American soliders living in improvised barracks.

It was extraordinary how some of the palace interiors had been transformed to accommodate the soldiers. Troops scurried beneath vaulted ceilings and glittering faux-crystal chandeliers. Lofty marble columns towered over rat runs between hastily constructed chipboard cubicles. Obama's face beamed out of televisions overlooking the freezers and microwaves of provisional canteen spaces.

Update: Flavorwire has another interview with Mosse about these images.

Getting the right photo

Art Wolfe details the process he went through to get just the right photo of some Chinese fishermen. There were many false starts.

By the time I was ready for the next shot, the darkening evening sky balanced the light somewhat. A 16mm focal length endowed the image with the depth I wanted and, combined with an f16 aperture, ideal depth of field. Waning light necessitated a one to two second exposure. Although blurred moving birds ruined most of the shots, they blocked direct light from the lanterns. I was making progress.

Perhaps even more interesting that Wolfe's process is the fishing method employed by his subjects; they use birds, not nets or poles:

For centuries fishermen on the Li River of Southern China have partnered with cormorants to catch fish. Each fisherman has a complement of half a dozen or so trained birds. The light of a lantern attracts the fish, and the cormorants return to the boat, fish in beak. They can't swallow them because the fisherman fix a band around their necks, but they eventually get their share.

(via penmachine)

Slow photography

In praise of slow photography.

One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.

When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It's very liberating.

Famous photos

A nice selection of "photos that changed the world". Warning: some of them are NSFW and/or disturbing/upsetting. The first photo on the web was new to me.

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch". How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

New NY Times photoblog

The NY Times kicks off their new photography blog with a video that shows just how short White House photo ops are.

When a photo-op is scheduled, the photographers, camera operators and reporters gather in the colonnade outside the Oval Office and wait -- sometimes it can be as long as an hour -- shuffling feet and making nervous small talk until the flutter of the fingers of the young staffer who calls, "Pool."

No downtime

Yesterday's Pictures of the Day at the WSJ were particularly fine, including a US soldier in Afghanistan who didn't have time to put on his uniform and gets caught by the camera taking up a defensive position in pink I [heart] NY boxers and flip flops.

Gaussian goat!

Some days I feel just like a gaussian goat.

This is perhaps what the world would look like if human vision could perceive all of an object's possible quantum mechanical states at the same time. (via today and tomorrow)

30 Rock

A photo of Rockefeller Center from 1933. The view is more or less looking west...that's St. Patrick's Cathedral in the foreground on the left.

Update: And here's another shot of 30 Rock from 1933.

Air Force One and The Statue of Liberty Photoshopped together

The hamfisted Air Force One NYC photo op cost taxpayers more than $320,000. Photoshop expert Scott Kelby says that using the graphics editing program for two minutes could have saved a lot of money and trouble.

Update: The NY Daily News had the same idea. (thx, @tshane)

Using NASA images

The Book Cover Archive Blog gets the skinny on using NASA images in creative work.

All of the media produced by NASA is public domain, meaning that anyone can use it any way (as long as they obey restrictions of publicity and privacy).

They also point to NASA Images, which is operated by Internet Archive and contains a copy of almost every image that NASA has ever produced. Just for the heck of it, here's the first photo of the Moon taken by a US spacecraft.

The Final Four of Everything by Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir

In a post on his great blog, The Year in Pictures, James Danziger discusses some of the photography featured in a forthcoming book, The Final Four of Everything, including Danziger's own selections for Iconic American Photographs. The Final Four of Everything seems to be a sequel of sorts to The Enlightened Bracketologist by the same authors...or perhaps just the same book with a much better title.

Moving photography

For the cover of Esquire's June issue, photographer Greg Williams shot ten minutes of video footage of Megan Fox, from which the best stills were selected for the cover and inside the magazine.

As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it's not such a huge shift for them. The photographer's exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.

Esquire's moving cover reminds me of two other things.

1. Flickr encourages their members to think of short videos as long photos. When he guest edited kottke.org last year, Deron Bauman wrote about short video as a contemporary version of the photograph. Matt Jones argued that looping short video is the real long photography. So maybe the photograph of 10 years from now might not even be a still image.

2. In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Clear all tabs

There's just too much good stuff on the internet today. So rather than flood the site with a bunch of posts, I'm going to clear out my tabs and round them up here.

Dear Prudence: "I cheated on my wife while sleepwalking. What do I do now?" I've heard quite a few weird/bad things about Ambien in the past few months. Also, paging Emily Gould from The Awl, please A this Q.

Rocketboom covers Single Serving Sites in their spin-off series, Know Your Meme.

The Big Picture peers into North Korea with a collection of photos of the dictatorship taken from neighboring China.

Maira Kalman visits Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, illustrating the story beautifully as usual.

I return to the court to hear Justice Ginsburg speak to law students. And in answer to the question "How does it feel to be the only woman on the court?" she answers simply, "Lonely."

The Society of Publication Designers has been busy posting nominees for their upcoming annual awards on their blog. Last year's winners are here. (thx, david)

Jamie Zawinski has used his keyboard so much over the past eight years that he's carved grooves into the M and N keys (with his fingernails?) and completely worn through part of his Alt key.

The Bride Was Beautiful

This was a tough series of photos to get through: The Bride Was Beautiful.

Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, held off cancer to celebrate the happiest day of her life. [...] Her organs were shutting down but it would not stop her from marrying Nick Godwin, 23, who was in love with Katie since 11th grade.

The last photo is just heartbreaking. (via cup of jo)

Composite NYC street scenes

Photographer Peter Funch spends weeks taking photos on Manhattan street corners and then pastes them together into single photographs.

I should add this (and Matt Webb's 4D experiment) to my time merge media post. (via capn design)

Chino Otsuka

Imagine Finding Me is a project by Chino Otsuka where she inserts her adult self into photos taken of her as a child. More examples at Wallpaper. See also Ze Frank's Youngme / Nowme and those neat half-kid, half-adult photos that I can't find a link to right now...little help? (via waxy)

Update: Age-maps! (thx, cindy)

So are the days of our lives

Microscopic photographs of individual sand particles, each grain "a tiny work of art". These are taken from Gary Greenberg's book, A Grain of Sand. More at Scientific American and Discover. (via lone gunman)

The death of a block

Jim Griffioen took photos of every house on a block in Detroit where most of the houses are abandoned and stitched them into panoramas.

If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006.

(via greg.org)

Dinghies Clustered Around Dock

By Alex MacLean. (via year in pictures)

Photography criticism from the Stasi

Harald Hauswald, an East German photographer, published in West Germany a book of his work in 1987. The East German secret police, the Stasi, put Hauswald under surveillance and even went so far as to produce a detailed critique of his book, as a photo critic might. Joerg Colberg recently met with the photographer and obtained a copy of the Stasi report on Hauswald's work. From the report's introduction:

Especially the selection of the images gives away that we are dealing with a book that has a long-term purpose. People gathered everything somber, oppressive, from poor neighbourhoods, or primitive they could find. It seems apparent that color was intentionally omitted, because only black and white reproduction stresses the supposedly gray, bleak and dismal reality of East Berlin.

It's interesting to hear the charge of propaganda coming from the secret police of a Communist dictatorship.

Through Hubble-colored glasses

If the naked eye could see like a telescope, this is what the night sky might look like. (via rw)

You're doing it wrong

From a series of posts on how not to photograph (for serious/professional photographers, I would presume): playing possum, the zig zag, and the vacation slide show. I am glad I'm not a serious photographer. (via conscientious)

Photo mystery

Hello photographers! I just ran across this photo (via TrueHoop) and was wondering if anyone out there knows how it was made. My guess is a combination of an IR camera, IR spotlight, and a bit of digital darkroom colorization after the fact. How else would you get lighting like that during an actual game? Anyone?

Update: Thanks, gang. Looks like a remotely fired strobe light is the culprit. No IR shenanigans needed.

Apple I prints

20x200 has a print by Mark Richards of an exploded Apple I machine.

In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.

(via df)

Patterns in a morass of historical materials

Errol Morris returns to his NY Times blog with a five-part story about a photograph found in the hands of an unknown Union army soldier who died at Gettysburg. Start with part one. A description of the photograph made it into the newspaper and the identity of the man was pretty quickly discovered. But the story hardly ends there. My favorite part so far is the fourth, particularly the conversation between Morris and one of the unknown soldier's descendants, archaeologist David Kelley.

Producing Peeps

A photo gallery that shows how marshmallow Peeps are made inside the Just Born confection company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Seeing a shower-capped woman dye-coat sugar with an industrial-grade sprayer puts a supreme damper on my sugar high.

Tilt-shift my heart

Peculiar little video by Keith Loutit for a song called "Clementine." Utilizes tilt-shift photography to achieve its miniature look.

via Nothing for X

Ansel Adams' key to photography

In a short video clip, Ansel Adams explains that visualization is the key to making photographs. (via lens culture)

The ruins of Detroit

The ruins of Detroit, a series of photos by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre documenting vacant buildings in Detroit. Some of the photos are repeated with useful annotation in this Time photo gallery. (See also Brian Ulrich's Stores That Are No More.)

On the other hand, some are arguing that there is great opportunity in Detroit right now.

Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished.

Panoramas from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of panoramic photographs dating from 1851-1991. As with all of the LOC stuff, I wish it were easier to browse through these. Guess I'll wait until they add everything to Flickr. (via design observer)

When Keds ruled the Universe

Photos of people in Brooklyn in the 1970s. (thx, paolo)

2009's emerging photographers

PDN recently posted their list of 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2009. Go here to access the photos without popups. Some nice stuff in there, including a couple photographers featured previously on kottke.org. (thx, youngna)

The Tao of War Photography

Bruce Haley shares his Tao of War Photography.

11. Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here...? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question...........

61. Yes, those really are gruesome hacked-up snake parts in that big glass of homebrew you're expected to chug down, and YES, your hosts will be extremely dishonored and upset if you try to weasel out of it (or if they catch you dumping it under the table when they look away)... quit being such a pussy and just drink the damn thing.....

Andreas Gefeller photography

Andreas Gefeller makes some really nice (and abstract and surreal) aerial photos.

Robots!

The Big Picture collects a number of photos of robots...particularly robots interacting with humans. (The third one is particularly freaky/awesome.) I'm wondering how these photos will look 50/60/70 years from now when (presumably) robots are smart & capable enough that they are thought of a new sentient life form (rather than as machines) and are entitled to the rights that humans have.

Synchronized bridge jumping

Synchonized jumping from bridges is a thing in Russia now.

It's new fun in some Russian cities, to jump from the bridge with the rope in a big group, when there is no water under the bridge but raw firm ice, also they use to jump at that same moment when the train is going thru the bridge -- just imagine what the machinist could think when he sees a bunch of people standing on the rails just before the moving train, so he probably starts slowing down and then all those people jump out of the bridge...

Photos of the recession

Slate is organizing its readers in an effort to photographically document the current recession/depression/economic crisis. The 30s had photos of people in soup lines and the 70s had gas lines but what does the economic crisis look like when everyone is online?

You can't take a picture of the unemployed if they never leave the house.

Interested photographers can upload their photos to Slate's Shoot the Recession group on Flickr.

Auto polo

A photo of some fellows playing polo with horseless carriages.

Looks like someone depressed their halting caliper a bit too quickly.

Update: From the NY Times, a report from 1912 on auto polo. The same page of the newspaper also contains a report of two gentleman who crossed the United States in a car without getting a single flat tire.

The two front tires contained Oregon air when they reached Massachusetts.

(via harrisj)

Nightclub hand signals

A Continuous Lean found some great Life magazine photos of Sherman Billingsley, the owner of a famous NYC nightclub called The Stork Club, which club was frequented by celebrities, artists, and the well-to-do from 1929 to 1965. In the photos, Billingsley is pictured at his club giving secret hand signals to his assistant while sitting with guests.

Closeup of Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley [with his] palm up on table, one of his signals to nearby assistant which means "Bring a bottle of champagne," while sitting w. patrons over his usual Coca Cola, in the Cub Room.

Billingsley's signals cleverly allowed the club to provide seamless good service to his favored patrons while also letting him be the bad guy with less favorable customers without them knowing it. Billingsley went on to be the third base coach for the Yankees in the late 60s. (Untrue.)

A poor photographer blames his tools

Is your lack of fancy camera equipment -- you know, the $3000 21-megapixel DSLR with HD video and f/1.4 lens -- holding you back from making good photographs? Maybe the problem is with your thinking. Many of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, etc.) got by just fine with equipment about as flexible as the average point-and-shoot.

Low-light sensitivity? Ha! Your point-and-shoot may only be noisy at ISO 200 and below, but these guys were working with things like Kodachrome 25, eight times worse. Depth-of-field? Ha! Partially because of the style of the times, and partially because they didn't want to deal with careful manual focus, most photojournalism of the time tended to have everything in focus -- "f/8 and be there" was the rule.

I also enjoyed the advice for getting good photos of your kids with a point-and-shoot camera: "encourage them to play somewhere well-lit." (via gulfstream)

At work

The Big Picture collected a bunch of photos of people at work, spinning silk yarn, on a shoe assembly line, sanding and buffing an Oscar statue, checking flour-making equipment, inspecting cigars, assembling model trains, and making toilet bowls.

Polaroid experiments

Peter Miller has done a number of projects that involve directly exposing Polaroid instant film. Static Fields:

These Polaroids were illuminated by their own electrocution. They are cameraless images, which are immediate records of the bolts of electricity that passed through them.

Lightning Bugs:

My brother helped me catch these, we let them loose on the Polaroids in the basement. Polaroids are positives. This is a record of lightning bug dance-steps. Look closely and you can see the shadows of their legs.

Polaroid Self Portrait:

Polaroids are removed from their case in a darkroom, laid flat and exposed as a single, light sensitive array. After they are exposed, they are reinserted into the pack and -with the lens now covered- can be processed by simply pressing the camera's shutter and processing the film by ejecting it from the camera.

Stacked cans

This photo by Bobby Yip of Reuters captures the current zeitgeist pretty well.

Unused shipping containers were piled up at a storage depot in Hong Kong Wednesday. The government is looking for places to store hundreds of thousands of unused containers expected to flood Hong Kong in the coming months due to China's slow exports.

The world has so much stuff we don't need that we don't know where to put it all. Perhaps people will be living in those stacks of containers before too long. (via wsj)

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Photographer Jesse Chan-Norris caught the aftermath of an attempted murder in Manhattan this morning. From his Flickr page:

At 5:40am I was jolted out of sleep by a noise. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. I raced outside, I looked down, I saw the black car with its door open. I saw another car next to it. I saw the body in the middle of the street. I stood. I gawked.

Punk Abe Lincoln

Another photo of Lincoln taken a couple months before he died, featuring a surprisingly contemporary hairstyle.

Abe looks downright rebellious in that photo. (via flickr blog)

Earliest Abe Lincoln photo?

The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln is purported to be the earliest known photo of the 16th President, taken in the early 1840s when he was in his early 30s. The young man in the photo doesn't bare an obvious resemblance to a photo taken of Lincoln a few years later but the forensic evidence is compelling.

Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight.

The Places We Live

The Places We Live features panoramic photos of slums, narrated by the people who live there (through translators). Really really engrossing. To access the stories in the restricting Flash interface, skip the intro, click on a city, and then on one of the households in the upper left corner. There's a book too. (via snarkmarket)

Bill Cunningham's Inauguration

Street photographer Bill Cunningham didn't have a ticket to the Inauguration nor did he have an assignment from the NY Times to cover it; he just bought a train ticket, went down on his own, and brought back these photos. Be sure to listen to Cunningham's wonderful narration; he even gets choked up when describing the moment of Obama's swearing-in. I wish all journalism were this professionally personal (if that makes any sense). (via greg.org)

Photos of George W. Bush

In his latest post for his NY Times blog, Errol Morris talks with three photographers -- one each from Reuters, AP, and AFP -- and has them select their ten favorite photos of George W. Bush.

He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I'd ever seen on George Bush's face in my life. [...] And I said, "If he wasn't just back there behind that door crying, I don't know what that look on his face is." Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it's just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.

The interview with the last photographer is the least interesting because he refuses to interpret any of the photographs but his set of photographs includes at least 3 photographs that I had never seen before and that weren't "published extensively in the United States".

Mapping the Moon

A zoomable National Geographic map of the Moon from 1969. Richard Furno worked on the map and tells the very long story of how it came about. One of the first images on the page is from a Soviet mission called Luna-3 that took the first photographs of the far side of the Moon. (thx, lynda)

A history of printing

The Printed Picture is an exhibition of physical specimens made using all the different ways that type and image can be printed on paper, metal, glass, etc, with a special emphasis on dozens of photography techniques, from albumen prints to dagguereotypes to color photography. On view at MoMA until June 1.

NYC Polaroid film cache

I know that Polaroid announced last year that they were ceasing production of their instant film and that people have begun to hoard film as it becomes more difficult to find. To NYC hoarders: there are 30-40 10-packs of Polaroid 600 film at the CVS on the corner of Nassau and Fulton. Didn't catch the price but they're at the photo processing counter past the registers. Or you could just wait it out.

An actual long photo

Simon Hoegsberg has taken a photo that's 100 meters long. It's actually several dozen photos stitched together into one big one. A good idea nicely executed. (thx, everyone)

The mystery of the Obama Hope photo

For all of the talk that Shepard Fairey is just a plagiarist, I think that the clearest indication that his art is above board and adding something new to the world is that until a few days ago, no one knew who had taken the photo of Obama that became the basis of the iconic Hope poster, not even Fairey or the photographer who took it.

Reuters are understandably somewhat put out on their own and Young's behalf, but like it or not, Fairey's use of the picture are well within the parameters of "fair use". His transformative use of the image - both in flipping and re-orienting it, adding jacket and tie and the "O" Obama logo, and converting it to his block print style make it consistent with all legal precedents for use.

Update: But, but ,but, not so fast. It looks like Tom Gralish has found the actual photo that Fairey used; it was taken by AP's Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in April 2006. (thx, ryan)

Video footage of Hudson River plane crash

I'm still fascinated by the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River late last week. Here are a few more things I've seen related to it over the last couple of days.

First the videos. Someone visiting the Bronx Zoo caught the plane on video, flying low in the sky just after the bird strike. A Coast Guard video monitoring station got a shot of the plane just after it splashed down...you can see the spray from the impact flying in from the left of the video just after the 2:00 mark.

Soon after the plane hits, the camera zooms in and you can see just how quickly people get out and onto the wings. And then this video shows it most clearly:

Look how low and level and steady Sully guided that thing in! Amazing!

The NY Times has a couple of good pieces in their extensive crash coverage. I loved reading what various passengers had to say about the crash, lots of little moments of heroism in there.

The life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft. "Carl was Iron Man that day," Mr. Wentzell said. "We got the raft stabilized and we got on." A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a fetal position, freezing.

The Times also comes through with the 3-D flight graphic I asked for the other day but they upped the ante with a seating chart of the plane where you can click on certain passengers' seats to read their thoughts. Mark Hood in seat 2A described the landing:

When we touched down, it was like a log ride at Six Flags. It was that smooth.

The whole thing is still so amazing. Looking at the underside of the plane as they lifted it from the water last night, you can see the damage to the bottom of the plane and just how close they all were to being flung all over the place or sinking quickly or a number of other different outcomes.

The Earth from above

Another excellent offering from The Big Picture: photos of the Earth from NASA's The Earth Observatory. Even if you don't care for cliches, some of these will literally drop your jaw.

The Selby

Every few weeks, I visit The Selby, an online collection of "photographs, paintings and videos by Todd Selby of interesting people in creative spaces", and spend way too much time clicking around, even on stuff that I've already seen. There are many magazines and sites -- Dwell, Domino, Apartment Therapy, etc. -- that run photographs of people and the spaces they live in, but those on The Selby feel more intimate and true to life; you get the feeling that Selby knows most of the people he features. Two of my favorite photos are Dustin Yellin and his huge printing machine:

and this lovely photo of Celestine Cooney and Harry Malt.

Update: Timely New York magazine interview with Todd Selby about The Selby.

Photo cliches blog

Photo Cliches is a blog dedicated to collecting, uh, cliched photos. Current categories include people groping statues, people pretending to have fake penises, and my personal favorite: people doing the thumbs-up Lynndie England pose. You may also be interested in the Charlie's Angels pose Flickr pool. (thx, phil)

Bill Cunningham and Greta Garbo

Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. (I love Cunningham's On the Street dispatches.) The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.

As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts -- you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit's. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, "I see you outside at lunchtime watching people." And I said, "Oh, yeah, that's my hobby." She said, "If you think what they're wearing is wrong, why don't you redo them in your mind's eye." That was really the first professional direction I received.

The second article is a collection of recollections of Cunningham from some of the people he has photographed.

He taught me how to tell a story with pictures and that it didn't always involve the best image. I'd say to him, "But isn't this a better photo?" And he'd say, "Yes, child, but this photo tells the story better." For him, it wasn't about the aesthetics of photography. It was about storytelling.

Both articles mention that Cunningham got his first street photography into the Times when he shot a photo of the famously reclusive Greta Garbo walking on Fifth Avenue. I couldn't find Cunningham's Garbo photo anywhere online so I tracked down the Times article and found only this poor scan:

Here's another shot Cunningham made that same day which didn't end up in the paper (Garbo's got her hand over her face). Interestingly, street photos of Garbo were not particularly rare. Here are a selection from the 1980s, including several that feature Garbo in similar clothing. Many of them were taken by creepy paparazzo Ted Leyson, who stalked Garbo for more than 10 years in NYC. Leyson took what is believed to be the last photo of Garbo before she died in 1990.

Abandoned in Harlem

Even in Manhattan, abandoned buildings can still be found. Jake Dobkin took some photos of an abandoned school in Harlem.

This building looked like it had been empty for twenty years. Trees were growing out of the floors and poking out of dozens of holes in the roof. All the windows were gone, and the floors that weren't covered with snow were thick with dust and the skeletons of dead pigeons. There wasn't any evidence of human habitation -- no footprints, homeless encampments, or graffiti.

He also found an abandoned ballroom, also in Harlem.

Update: Whoops, looks like Bluejake got swamped. I removed the links so the server can recover...here are the photos on Flickr instead.

Aquarium design

Photos from the 2008 International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest...AKA fancily decorated aquariums. (thx, dustin)

Infinite Jest Tour of Boston

A photo tour of the Boston-area locations mentioned in Infinite Jest. From the photographer:

Perhaps most interestingly, although "Enfield" is not a real town, it seems to substitute for Chestnut Hill. We found a school at the top of one of the larger hills in Chestnut Hill, which we believe is the location for ETA.

Perhaps someday there will be IJ walking tours of Boston that same way there are Ulysses -based tours of Dublin or Sex and the City tours of NYC.

TiltShiftMaker, make your own tilt-shift photo

The TiltShiftMaker site lets you make your own fake tilt-shift photo (you know, the ones that make everything look miniature). Just upload a photo or choose one from the web, adjust a few parameters, and you're all set...no Photoshop needed. Here's one I did of Ollie in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (larger). (via chris glass)

Obama campaign art exhibition

The Danziger Projects gallery in New York is running an exhibition called Can & Did, a collection of art, graphics, and photography from the Obama campaign. The opening party is on Inauguration night (Jan 20) and it runs through the end of February. All details in the press release.

TinEye image search

TinEye is an image search engine. You give it an image and it'll find it on the web for you. If it works -- I didn't get to try it too much because it was down -- this is great for chasing down attribution and finding other pix by the same photographer and such. (via master kalina)

Abandoned London

Photographs of an abandoned London. Turns out that the streets of London on Christmas morning are extraordinarily empty. Details here. (thx, peter)

Photos of The Wire soundstage

Photos of the abandoned soundstage for The Wire.

So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours. It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it.

(thx, hurty)

NY Times Year in Pictures

The NY Times' Year in Pictures for 2008.

Worst photo ever?

Is a recent Annie Leibovitz photograph shot for the 2009 Lavazza espresso calendar the worst photograph ever made?

This picture as a whole has absolutely zero connection to reality or honest depiction, but is unredeemed by any countervailing expressive or artistic purpose. And (and this puts it out in front of many other contenders) it was all done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.

It is a horrible photograph. Leibovitz's recent portrait of Queen Elizabeth was also digitally stitched up...the Queen was photographed inside and later matched with a garden background. I'm not going to say that these aren't photographs, but they aren't the kind of photographs that I'm fond of.

Big Picture's photos of the year

The wonderful Big Picture presents part one of the year 2008 in photographs. I'll say it again, seeing these fantastic photos large is a whole 'nother ball game. Parts two and three to come later today and tomorrow.

Update: Part two.

Update: And part three.

Obama, Time's Person of the Year for 2008

In an obvious move, Time named Barack Obama their Person of the Year for 2008. But give Time credit; they got Shepard Fairey to do the cover based on his iconic poster of Obama.

Update: They've also compiled some of the best photos of Obama from Flickr.

Update: Here's a video of Fairey talking about his work and how he created the Time cover.

Changing New York

Included in the NYPL's recent addition to the Flickr Commons project is Changing New York, a selection of photos taken of NYC in the 1930s by Berenice Abbott as part of a government program for unemployed artists. Here are the Starrett-Lehigh Building and looking north from Washington Square...so open! And the buildings are so low too. The Cyanotypes of British Algae set is worth a look as well.

Seed's science photography portfolio

Seed Magazine has collected some of the wonderful science-themed photography which appears in the pages of the magazine into an online portfolio.

Bacteria photo by Eshel Ben-Jacob.

Scooters

Top: The Jackson 5, Encino, CA, 1970. Photographed by John Olson for Life Magazine.

Bottom: "Bad Route" by Miguel Calderon, 1998. Featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Book cover contest

The challenge: create a fictitious book cover using an image from the Life magazine photo archive. Aside from the first few created in a rush, some of these are pretty good.

Ballet, with sword

An arresting image:

Seventeen-year-old Yamaguchi Otoya uses a foot-long sword to kill Japan Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inajiro on a public stage in Tokyo. Yamaguchi was upset with Asanuma's support of a U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty.

The Best of LIFE

The Best of LIFE blog is mining Google's Life Magazine archive and Flickr's Commons for the best photos.

Photos of all the street corners in Manhattan

Richard Howe takes photographs of Manhattan street corners. From March to November 2006, Howe took a photo of every single street corner in Manhattan, around 11,000 in all.

I photographed each corner just as I found it, almost always as seen from its diagonally opposite corner. Some of the photographs have no people and no traffic, others are completely dominated by people or even, in some instances, by traffic; the majority are somewhere in between. Most of the photographs simply show what people were doing on the corner when I got there: crossing the street or waiting to cross it, shopping, hanging out, riding a bicycle, and so on -- in short, doing what people do at almost any street corner anywhere in Manhattan.

The old hero of Gettysburg

1863 photo of John L. Burns, War of 1812 veteran and sharpshooter in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Burns, born ca. 1793, was a 70-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 when he was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, having volunteered his services as a sharpshooter to the Federal Army. He died of pneumonia in 1872.

And from the comments:

Mr Burns' flintlock is at half-cock with the frizzen down, ready to ready to fire.

Photography is for Jerkoffs

The language on this one might offend some, but I thoroughly enjoyed this expletive-laden anti-photographer rant: Photography is for Jerkoffs. Here's how to be a photographer in seven easy steps:

1) Make sure you have a LOT OF FUCKING NATURAL LIGHT.

2) Make sure the natural light SOURCE is behind you

3) Make sure the flash on your camera is OFF. If you need a FLASH, it means you don't have enough NATURAL LIGHT. (step 1)

4) Look through the viewfinder: Make sure that everything in your shot is symmetrical. If a tiny bit of it isn't, like a bird or a queer walking down the street, that's OK because it makes the photo "cool." Go watch every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made if you don't understand this. (Study Alex's fake eyelash as the archetypal stylistic symmetry violator)

5) Take pictures of everyday shit from stupid angles but make sure it's all SYMMETRICAL and that it isn't MOVING.

6) Make sure YOU don't move or have your fat black fingers in front of the lens when you push the button. (priceless tip: push the button down halfway, wait for a clicky sound, and then push it all the way in - this is the BIG photography secret that professionals don't want you to know.)

7) Take TONS of photos of the same thing and then only use the good ones where the bird or the queer wasn't blinking.

You're done. You're a fucking photographer. See how easy that is? That's because it's for JERKOFFS.

(via avenues)

NYC, then and now comparison photos

The NY Times has photographer David Dunlap running around NYC taking updated versions of the photos he took of the city for Paul Goldberger's 1978 guidebook to Manhattan, The City Observed: New York. Recent Now/Then comparisons include Grand Central Terminal, the corner of 59th St and 5th Ave (where the Apple Store is), and, perhaps the most striking pair of photos, the Hudson River shoreline.

A fashion model for the ages

Vogue Paris has an editorial in the November 2008 issue which features a 20-year-old model photographed as if she were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. The hands betray her true age in the 40, 50, and 60 shots but the 10-year-old photo is a little bit of brilliance...just the right angle and lighting. (via the year in pictures)

Life magazine photographs online

Wow, Google is hosting millions of photographs from Life magazine from the 1860s to the 1970s. Would have been nice to see these on Flickr instead (so that people could add tags, annotate, etc.), but this is an amazing resource. (via df)

Advice for young photographers

Alec Soth asks a bunch of photographers a) when did you first get excited about photography? and b) what advice would you give young photographers?

Don't stop questioning yourself (it'll make you less arrogant). Push. Push, scratch, dig... Push further... And stop when you don't enjoy it anymore... But most of all respect those you photograph...

(via conscientious)

Battle of the HD video cameras

Now that the Flip has released their handheld digital HD video camera, here's a little rundown of the offerings currently out there and coming soon.

Kodak Zi6 - 128MB of built-in memory, expandable to 32GB, 720p, 1280x720 at 60 fps, 2.4 in. LCD, AA rechargable batteries. $180. (Video sample.)

Flip Video MinoHD - 4GB of built-in memory (~60 min of video), 720p, 1280x720 at 30 fps, 1.5 in. LCD, very slim handheld. $229. (Video sample.)

Nikon D90 SLR - expandable SD memory, 720p, 1280x720 at 24 fps for 5 minutes at a time, 3 in. LCD, and almost every single setting and control that's available on a SLR camera. $1200. (Video samples.)

Canon 5D Mark II SLR - expandable CF memory, 1080p, 1920x1080 at 24 fps for 30 minutes at a time, 3 in. LCD, and almost every single setting and control that's available on a SLR camera. $2700. (Video sample.)

Red One - Not going to list the specs on this one, except to to say that you can shoot whole feature length movies on this thing at a higher resolution for less money than pretty much any other camera out there, digital or otherwise. $17500. (Gorgeous video sample.)

European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008

Check out the winners of the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 competition...lots of amazing photography here. Warning: the winning image is a little disturbing for the faint of heart.

Final photos

A list of final photographs taken of people before they died. Included Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, and Adolf Hitler. (via cyn-c)

Female bodybuilders

Photos of women bodybuilders. If you cover up the faces with your hands, they look like men in bikini tops and if you cover up the bodies, meth addicts.

New York in the 1930s

A lovely photo set of New York City from the 1930s. My favorites are the crowded beach scene at Coney Island, Margaret Bourke-White's shot of hats in the Garment District, and a shot of "the Lung Block" on the Lower East Side. In due time, that then-notorious but now-beautiful block was razed to make way for one of Manhattan's first large apartment complexes, Knickerbocker Village which at various times housed several members of the Bonnano crime family and Julius & Ethel Rosenberg. (thx, mark)

1908 basketball

Photo of a less-than-fast-paced game of basketball at Columbia University in 1908.

Really busy Brooklyn

For his Fabric of Brooklyn project, Tom Mason took photos of scenes in Brooklyn and combined them to depict super-bustling neighborhoods. Reminded me of this wonderful composite image of a busy airport by Ho-Yeol Ryu.

Photographic buildings

Filip Dujardin samples photos of buildings to create new photographs of improbable, impossible, or fantastical buildings.

These are great.

Update: More fictional architecture, this time by Philipp Schaerer. (via today and tomorrow)

Touching strangers

Richard Renaldi's photos of touching strangers seem a little predictable to me -- white guy with black family, blue-collar guy with white-collar guy, blig black guy with white family -- but still worth a look. Joerg Colberg thinks they're amazing:

Asking two complete strangers to not only pose with each other, but to also touch each other while doing that... And this in a culture whose discomfort with touching someone you don't know, or touching something that someone else might have touched still baffles me, even after having spent almost ten years in it! I remember I asked Richard how he actually did that. How do you ask complete strangers to pose with and touch each other? How do you do that in New York City of all places?

The act of making a photograph turns the subjects into actors, and two actors touching each other isn't that unusual. When I look at many of these photos, I see actors and that detracts from the intimacy. Even so, I love this one.

Lost photographs of the bombing of Hiroshima

A month after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the US government imposed a code of censorship in Japan, which means that photos of the effects of the nuclear device are somewhat difficult to come by. Enter diner owner Don Levy of Watertown, MA.

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor's house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges -- snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

The photographs were taken by the US Strategic Bombing Survey immediately after the war and are now in the possession of the International Center of Photography. A copy of a report made by the US Strategic Bombing Survey is available online at the Truman Library.

A small audience at the Lincoln Memorial

When it looked as though Obama was going to win the election, former photojournalist Matt Mendelsohn went to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC expecting to find a huge crowd of celebrants.

I'd spent most of election night in front of the TV in Arlington, Va. But around 11 p.m. I couldn't sit idle any longer, which is why I sped to the memorial. When I arrived, I found a TV crew sitting on the plaza above the Reflecting Pool, waiting, I assumed, for a mob to arrive. I approached with cameras in hand. One of them looked up and said with a slight roll of his eyes, "Nothing to see here."

Instead he found a small group of people listening to Obama's acceptance speech on a transistor radio and shot this wonderful picture of the scene. I can't think of an image that better characterizes the grass-roots, get-out-the-vote, small-donations-by-millions-of-people aspect of Obama's campaign. (via 3qd)

Update: Here's another view of the same scene. (thx, andy)

Obama bits and loose ends

Flickr is getting slammed right now (I'm getting a lot of "hold your clicks" messages) because of the behind-the-scenes election night photos the Obama campaign put up yesterday. Maybe bookmark and come back in a few hours?

I've updated the post about the NY Times' use of 96-pt type for their Obama headline. They've used the big type at least one additional time, on 1/1/2000.

Kristen Borchardt made an awesome video that takes a number of Nov 5th newspaper front pages and animates through them using each papers' Obama photo as the focal point...very much like YTMND's Paris Hilton doesn't change facial expressions.

Obama photo mosaics.

I've also updated the election headlines post with a few more collections that popped up.

Hopefully I'll have some time this afternoon to update the 2008 Election Maps page; I've got lots of good submissions waiting in my inbox. Thanks to everyone who sent in links and screenshots.

Idea for the Obama administration: fireside chats. On the radio, on satellite radio, as a podcast, transcripts available online soon after airing. Done live if possible, a genuine lightly scripted chat. Maybe Obama could have special guests on to talk about different aspects of policy and government. Bush does weekly radio addresses but they're short, boring, and scripted.

Newsweek has posted the rest of their seven-part piece on the 2008 election: part four, part five, part six, part seven. I wrote about the first three installments yesterday.

More related stuff on kottke.org: the barackobama, 2008election, and politics tags.

And I gotta tell you, if change.gov is indicative of how the Obama administration is going to use the web to engage with Americans, this is going to be an interesting four years.

Ok, that's probably the last Obama post for a bit. Back to your irregularly unscheduled programming.

Classic Star Wars photos

Three collections of old Star Wars photos and illustrations: 1) a huge collection of classic Star Wars stills, set photos, etc., 2) a smaller collection of photos from the set of the first film, and 3) some early storyboards from the first movie, tentatively titled "The Star Wars".

Great photos of Obama

The Big Picture, the best new blog of the year, celebrates the victory of Barack Obama, no doubt Time's Man of the Year for 2008, with some of the best photos of the President-Elect taken over the past few months.

Star location service

If you submit your astronomy photo to the Astrometry group on Flickr, a tool of the same name will look at the image, tell you the location of the field of view, and label all of the celestial objects contained within it. Here's an annotated photo of the Pleiades.

Your assignment: use the Astrometry and Exif data to stitch all these photos together into a huge Hockney-esque map of the sky. I am also wondering the extent to which you can fool Astrometry with, say, a painting of a portion of the sky. It would be neat if you could submit a drawing of a constellation and get the correct star IDs back. (via mouser)

The completed Metropolitan Life Tower

Shorpy has posted a photo of the Metropolitan Life Tower taken in 1909, the year the building was completed. I recently wrote posts about the building and about an odd death that occurred there. (thx, finn)

Photos of NYC signs

A collection of photos of signs located in NYC from 14th St to 42nd St in Manhattan. Many of the photos were taken in the 80s and 90s and the signs they depict are already gone. The photos are extensively annotated...this is a real history lesson.

Historic Paris photography

It seems like I've linked to this before but why not again? Paris en Images is a huge collection of historic photos of Paris.

Choosing Flickr photos by color

Idée Multicolr Search Lab is pretty amazing. You select up to ten colors and it returns Flickr photos with those colors. I couldn't stop playing with this.

An intimate look at Obama

A fantastic series of photos from Time photographer Callie Shell of Barack Obama. Shell has been photographing Obama since 2004.

Obama listens from a back stairwell as he is introduced in Muscatine, Iowa. It was his second or third speech of the day. Unlike many of the politicians I have photographed in the past, I find it is easy to get a photograph of Obama alone. He lets his staff do their jobs and not fuss over him.

I loved that he cleaned up after himself before leaving an ice cream shop in Wapello, Iowa. He didn't have to. The event was over and the press had left. He is used to taking care of things himself and I think this is one of the qualities that makes Obama different from so many other political candidates I've encountered.

Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech.

It's always the little things.

PhotoSwap

PhotoSwap is a simple iPhone app: you take a photo, the app sends it to another user at random, and you get a random one in return. Check out a review and a bunch of photos people have received through the app. (thx, david)

Fenway as scale model

A fake tilt-shift photo of Fenway Park in Boston makes the ballpark look like a scale model. I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick. (via let's go mets)