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Nikon has announced the winning entries in the 2019 Small World Photomicrography Competition. Here are a few of the winners that caught my eye:
From top to bottom, cells undergoing mitosis by Jason Kirk, a frozen water droplet by Garzon Christian, and a housefly eye by Razvan Cornel Constantin. Check out the rest of the winning entries here. (via in focus)
Until his death in 2016, Bill Cunningham captured the fashions of people walking the streets and catwalks of NYC and elsewhere, mostly for the NY Times over the past five decades. A new book, Bill Cunningham: On the Street, is the first published collection of his work and includes more than 700 photos along with a number of essays by friends, subjects, and cultural critics.
You can read more about Cunningham and the photos in the book in a pair of Times articles: The Amazing Treasure Trove of Bill Cunningham and Seeing What Bill Cunningham Saw, the latter of which describes so good ol’ fashioned digging through the archives to find some gems:
Then there were “black hole” years, when his photos ended up in the database with gibberish on them. Someone created a template to make things easier for captioning, but it wasn’t used properly. Hundreds of photos just have the template on them, over and over again.
Large chunks of Bill’s work simply could not be found.
When I was going through the files for 2009, I was unable to find his photos from Barack Obama’s inauguration. (Bill went down to Washington for the day and devoted his column to it.) This material would have been completely lost had it not been for the Times archivist Jeffrey Roth, who just happened to have saved a few boxes of seemingly unnecessary paper printouts of Bill’s photos from 2009 and a few other years. It was one of those “I’ve been meaning to throw these out …” kind of things.
I looked through one of the boxes and, astoundingly, unearthed printouts of the inauguration photos. The printouts led me, via a tortuous back-roads path, to the digital files. As it turned out, not even Bill’s name was on many hundreds of his images. I would go on to find other must-have images in those boxes as well.
You can order the book on Amazon.
The winning images in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 contest have been announced by the Natural History Museum in London. Here are a few of my favorites (by Audun Rikardsen, Max Waugh, and Shangzhen Fan):
Here’s how Rikardsen got that incredible shot of the eagle:
Audun carefully positioned this tree branch, hoping it would make a perfect lookout for a golden eagle. He set up a camera trap and occasionally left road-kill carrion nearby. Very gradually, over the next three years, this eagle started to use the branch to survey its coastal realm. Audun captured its power as it came in to land, talons outstretched.
You can check out the rest of the winners here. See also First Look: 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, featuring a selection of entries from the contest. (via in focus)
I’ve featured Reuben Wu’s work here before so when I saw via Colossal that he’s got some new stuff going on, I immediately went to check it out. In his Aeroglyphs, Lux Noctis, and Field of Infinity projects, Wu achieves a minimalist sci-fi lighting effect by using drones to light desolately beautiful natural landscapes. Check out his Instagram and Facebook for more images, particularly this video.
Oh, and he also caught the recent total solar eclipse in Chile in this video and this photo. Wow. Kicking myself a little bit that I did not get organized to head to Chile for this.
With the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet Union kicked off the Space Race and for the first several years (arguable up until the Moon landing in ‘69), they dominated the United States. One of their “firsts” in the early years was taking the first photo of the far side of the Moon 60 years ago this month.
Astronomer Kevin Hainline wrote a fascinating account of how the Soviet’s Luna 3 spacecraft took the photo and then transmitted it back to Earth.
First off, Luna 3, the first three-axis stabilized spacecraft, had to reach the Moon to take the pictures, and it had to use a little photocell to orient towards the Moon so that now, while stabilized, it could take the pictures. Which it did. On PHOTOGRAPHIC FILM.
And it gets WILDER because these photos were then moved to a little CHEMICAL PLANT to DEVELOP AND DRY THEM. That’s right, Luna 3 had a little 1 Hour Photo inside. Now you’re thinking, well, how do you get those actual photos back to the Earth?
How indeed? The spacecraft faxed the photos to Earth. A few years later, when the Soviets’ Luna 9 took the first photo on the Moon’s surface and went to transmit it back to Earth, a group in the UK was able to read the signal with a fax machine and the resulting image was published the next day on the front page of the Daily Express.
The World Photography Organization has shared some of the early entries for the 2020 Sony World Photography Awards with In Focus. Here are a couple of my favorites (from Khanh Phan and F. Dilek Uyar respectively):
Pros and amateurs alike can enter the competition on the WPO site…deadlines are in January 2020. And check out their blog for more of their favorite early entries.
For decades, Kevin Kelly has been traveling in Asia documenting traditional cultures and environments while they still exist. Here are some photos from his recent visits to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan .
Jessica Wynne has been taking photos of mathematicians’ blackboards for the past year or so, some of which were featured recently in the NY Times. I love the variety in density, style, color, and tidiness.
“I am also fascinated by the process of working on the chalkboard. Despite technological advances, and the creation of computers, this is how the masters choose to work.”
In their love of blackboards and chalk, mathematicians are among the last holdouts. In many fields of science and investigation, blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards or slide show presentations. But chalk is cheaper and biodegradable. It smells better than whiteboard markers and is easier to clean up, mathematicians say. It is also more fun to write with.
A book of Wynne’s chalkboard photos called Do Not Erase will be released next year.
Ever since Starman in 1984, Jeff Bridges has taken photos on the set of every film he’s acted in using his Widelux F8 camera. Sometimes he compiles them into picture books for the cast and crew. Sometimes he posts them to his charmingly old school website. And sometimes he compiles them into coffee table books that you and I can have in our homes. Nick Chen recently interviewed Bridges about his photography.
Dazed: You did The Big Lebowski and True Grit with the Coen Brothers. What do they make of your photography?
Jeff Bridges: I think they get a kick out of it. They’re pretty cool cats. They don’t go overboard with praise or anything. They’re certainly wonderful to work with, and they’re true masters, so I was happy that they gave a stamp of approval on my book. That was nice.
Dazed: Does Roger Deakins ever want a co-credit for doing the lighting?
Jeff Bridges: (laughs) No, he did not ask me. But wow, talk about masters. Isn’t he terrific? My God, he does it just right.
Pictures by Jeff Bridges was released in 2003 and now a follow-up is coming out in mid-October 2019: Jeff Bridges: Pictures Volume 2. (thx, david)
Update: The International Center of Photography honored Bridges with an award in 2013 and produced this video about his photography.
The internet is 97% hilarious animals and today we have the best of the best. The finalists for the 2019 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have been announced. Among them are this well-timed shot of a bird who’s really hauling:
A small chimp kicking back at his desk after a hard day at work:
And then there’s this dramatic fellow:
You can check out the rest of the finalists on the website. (via digg)
Update: See also this enraptured squirrel smelling a yellow flower.
Augustus Sherman worked as a registry clerk for the immigration station on Ellis Island from 1892 to 1925. Sherman was also an amateur photographer and while he worked, he took portraits of some of the immigrants that passed through Ellis Island, many dressed in traditional garb.
These images of people wearing their folk costumes were taken by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman who worked as the Chief Registry Clerk on Ellis Island from 1892 until 1925. The people in the photographs were most likely detainees who were waiting for money, travel tickets or someone to come and collect them from the island. In 1907, the photographs were published in National Geographic, and they were also hung on the walls of the lower Manhattan headquarters of the federal Immigration Service.
A selection of the photographs are housed by the NYPL (also on Flickr).
Kirk Weddle took the iconic photograph of the underwater baby for the cover of Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind. On his website, he describes the shoot and the process that resulted in the final photo. Before the baby went into the water, Weddle used a doll to get the lighting and focus right.
Once I felt I had the framing, light, and exposure dialed in; the parents slipped the child into the water. I took seven frames on the first pass and four frames on the second. As expected, the baby started to cry, this had been the babies first time underwater, and we wrapped the shoot. The dollar bill and the fishhook were stripped in in post.
The baby’s name was Spencer Elden, who has recreated the underwater scene more than once as an adult. He’s even got a tattoo that says “Nevermind” on his chest.
(via life is so beautiful)
The Natural History Museum has released a sneak preview of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for 2019, sharing several “Highly Commended” photos from the exhibition.
Photo credits: Peter Haygarth (top) and Thomas P Peschak (bottom).
For her O.P.P. series, Heather Oelklaus weaves together strips of cut-up prints to form new scenes.
In the series O.P.P. (Other People’s Photography), hand woven silver gelatin and inkjet prints survey stereotypical and nostalgic notions. Found photographs from US Army wives’ gatherings and Hollywood film stills are woven together to reconstruct new narratives. The expressive gaze within these staged photographs breaks through the picture’s surface as if to confront the viewer. These sophisticated slices of history illustrate an era of inclusion and exclusion while leaving the viewer to compare present day relationships.
Yesterday I linked to a thread discussing old school bloggers who are still active. One of the best of the old guard is very much still at it: Alan Taylor. Taylor has been curating photographic essays the The Atlantic for more than 8 years — and for several years before that at The Boston Globe and on his own blog. His latest features the work of Margaret Bourke-White, one of my all-time favorite photographers.
That first shot is an alternate view of this iconic photo.
By 1929, she began working for magazine publishers, joining both Fortune and, later, LIFE. She spent years traveling the world, covering major events from World War II to the partition of India and Pakistan, the Korean War, and much more. Bourke-White held numerous “firsts” in her professional life — she was the first foreign photographer allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry, she was the first female staff photographer for LIFE magazine and made its first cover photo, and she was the first woman allowed to work in combat zones in World War II.
Here’s Bourke-White in a fleece-lined flight suit during World War II, ready to work. Badass.
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