Liquid sculpture
Shinchi Maruyama throws water from his hands or from glasses and catches the temporary sculptures they make with his camera.
The Morning News has an interview with Maruyama and a photo gallery of his work; this one is really cool.
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kottke.org posts about photography
The year in photos, 2010
The Big Picture has chosen its best photos of the year for 2010. Part one, part two, part three. What a world we live in.
Old photos of New York City
The Museum of the City of New York has put a sizable chunk of their photography collection up on their web site. The interface is a little hinky, but it’s worth wading through. This is 220 Spring St from 1932, from right near Sixth Avenue:
Photo credit: 220 Spring Street by Charles Von Urban. From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York. (thx, @bamstutz)
1912 bike shop
The photo is of a Detroit bike shop circa 1912. View it large. Looks like there’s a few motorcycles in there and some records and record players.
The sweaty glass of the Tokyo subway
From photographer Michael Wolf — you might remember his Architecture of Density or 100x100 projects — a collection of photos of people pressed against fogged-up Tokyo subway windows.
(via coudal)
Abbey sidewalk
Just before the famous Abbey Road photo was taken, The Beatles were photographed on the sidewalk waiting to cross the street.
(via matt)
Kim Jong-il looks at things
A collection of photos of Dear Leader looking at things: corn, your desktop, wheat.
Actually, I can’t recall seeing a photo of Kim doing anything but looking at stuff. (thx, steve)
National Geographic 2010 photography contest
The Big Picture has a selection of photos from this year’s National Geographic photography contest. It was difficult to pick a favorite, but I’ll go with this one:
Super Grandma!
Photographer Sacha Goldberger has his depressed grandmother pose for a series of outlandish superhero photos. The result was very theraputic for the 91-year-old woman.
Initially, she did not understand why all these people wrote to congratulate her. Then, little by little, she realized that her story conveyed a message of hope and joy. In all those pictures, she posed with the utmost enthusiasm. Now, after the set, Goldberger shares that his grandmother has never shown even a trace of depression.
(via mathowie)
Downtown from behind
If you crossed The Sartorialist with The Selby and put the whole thing on a bike, you’d get Downtown From Behind, a collection of photographs of creative people biking the streets of downtown Manhattan, shot from behind.
Photo finishers
The NY Times has a photo slideshow of some NYC marathon participants right after they crossed the finish line yesterday. Why don’t any of them look exhausted?
Overlapping digital mosaics
Mosaic collages like this one — where each “pixel” is a tiny self-contained image — are fairly common but I haven’t seen too many like these before:
Lovely effect; they’re fun to look at zoomed in or out. (via matt)
100 portraits
One hundred photos from one hundred photographers, including those from Noah Kalina, David Maisel, Zoe Strauss, Phillip Toledano, etc. (via kalina)
Big orange ball
What is this, do you think? Electron microscope photo of pollen? Infrared tennis ball? Mars? The inside of a baseball?
It’s actually a photo of the Sun taken at the H-alpha wavelength by an amateur astronomer.
NYC subway photos, 1917-present
Slideshow of almost 100 years of photography of the NYC subway system by the NY Times.
The caption for the photo above reads:
1940: In a view north from 106th Street, only the supports of the old Ninth Avenue elevated line remained as the push to go underground continued.
Zach Galifianakis swimsuit calendar
Vanity Fair photo shoot? Check.
Zach Galifianakis? Check.
Red ladies bathing suit? Sweet Jesus.
The value of a dollar
For his The Value of a Dollar project, Jonathan Blaustein took photographs of the amount of food he could purchase for a dollar.
From an interview at the NY Times’ Lens blog:
It was a cheeseburger that initially encouraged Mr. Blaustein, 36, to pursue his project, “The Value of a Dollar.” When the economy was in the midst of its downward spiral, he visited a fast-food chain in New Mexico, where he lives. “On one menu they had a cheeseburger for a dollar,” he said. What caught his eye, though, was another menu, which featured a double cheeseburger for the same price. That additional piece of meat, and the extra slice of cheese, somehow didn’t change the price.
A boring drill builds an exciting tunnel
This is the massive drill that was used to bore a 35-mile-long tunnel underneath the Alps from mid-Switzerland to near the Italian border:
Boring operations in the east tunnel were completed on 15 October 2010 in a cut-through ceremony broadcast live on Swiss TV. When it opens for traffic in late 2017, the tunnel will cut the 3.5-hour travel time from Zurich to Milan by an hour and from Zurich to Lugano to 1 hour 40 minutes.
Lots of big machines to make a tiny Sun
The Big Picture has a selection of photos of the National Ignition Facility which I’ve written about previously.
“Creating a miniature star on Earth” is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world’s largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California. On September 29th, 2010, the NIF completed its first integrated ignition experiment, where it focused its 192 lasers on a small cylinder housing a tiny frozen capsule containing hydrogen fuel, briefly bombarding it with 1 megajoule of laser energy. The experiment was the latest in a series of tests leading to a hoped-for “ignition”, where the nuclei of the atoms of the fuel inside the target capsule are made to fuse together releasing tremendous energy — potentially more energy than was put in to start the initial reaction, becoming a valuable power source.
The NIF and the LHC are this generation’s Apollo program.
Sometimes the best camera is a gun
Love this. In 1936, a 16-year-old Dutch girl played a shooting gallery game at the fair: hit the target and a camera takes a photo, which the girl receives as a prize. Almost every year between then and now, Ria van Dijk shot the target and got her prize.
Van Dijk is now 88 and still shooting.
Photos of the rescued Chilean miners
The Big Picture has a selection of photos of the rescue of the Chilean miners. Here’s some video of the first few miners being rescued:
As I write, 17 of the 33 miners have been rescued.
The making of The Empire Strikes Back
Vanity Fair has excerpts (photos mostly) of a new book on the making of The Empire Strikes Back.
This is right before Luke fell to his death sleep. (via df)
Found photo animations
Cassandra Jones takes photographs she finds online and stiches them together to form animations like this Eadweard Muybridge homage:
Really nice. Jones’ other work is worth a look as well. (via heading east)
The reluctant father
Photographer Phillip Toledano didn’t particularly want to be a father. But then he and his wife had a daughter.
Loulou seemed like such an alien thing, that the first time I heard her sneeze, I was filled with joy.
It was the first human thing I’d seen her do that made any sense to me.
Imagine listening to someone speaking a foreign language, and then suddenly you hear the word “McDonald’s.”
I was somewhat of a reluctant father as well. I think it’s ok to feel that this stranger in your life maybe isn’t the greatest thing ever. Newborns are hard; you do feel like chucking them out the window at times. Your interaction with others, especially with your spouse, becomes weird and one-sided and not at all about your needs and desires. But that’s how it is…you fake it ‘til you make it. Of course, I love my kids to pieces now and it’s difficult to remember when that wasn’t the case.
Bouncing baby bombs
This little guy is a newborn uncontrolled nuclear fisson reaction. You know, an atomic bomb.
This is from a NY Times photo slideshow of atomic bomb explosions. Check out the school bus sequence starting at slide #14.
Long exposure photos of video games
Rosmarie Fiore did this series of long exposure photographs of Atari games a few years ago.
Fiore did a similar project with pinball machines…instead of photos, the ball was covered in paint and left trails on vellum. Reminds me of some of the other time merge media I collected awhile back. (via @brainpicker)
There’s a hole in the Moon
From a typically excellent selection of photos taken from space curated by Alan Taylor over at The Big Picture, there’s this:
I don’t know why, but that freaks me right out. THERE’S A FREAKING HOLE IN THE MOON!!
Time slice photos
Photographer Adam Magyar uses scanner cameras to take these huge panoramic photos which are a little difficult to explain.
Adam uses the same technologies as the finish line cameras at the Olympic Games, which take thousands of images a second and records through a 1 pixel wide slit. The time and space slices are then placed next to one another to generate an image without perspective. This method is capable of recording movement only, with static objects and buildings appearing as stripes and lines.
Here’s just a small slice of one of his photos…you’ll notice that it does look an awful lot like the photo-finish photos of sprinters.
(via lens culture)
The interior design style of dictators
Nick Gleis shoots the interiors of corporate jets owned by African dictators and other heads of state. I couldn’t decide which jet interior was the gaudiest, but this one is definitely a contender because of the classy naked ladies on the wall of the bedroom.
Who knew that African dictators were so nostalgic for the set design of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Macro eye photos
Wonderful close-up photography of eyes by Suren Manvelyan. Like really close-up:
Is that a tiny lake in there? I am going to have dreams about that one tonight. (via df)
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