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.
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kottke.org posts about photography
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.
Nail houses
Inspired by Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up, which was holding up construction of a massive building complex, deputydog uncovers some more such houses, which are actually called nail houses.
Another nail house is actually a nail church. Citicorp Center was built without corner columns to accommodate St. Peter’s Church, which occupied one corner of the block on which the skyscraper was built. The engineer who built Citicorp Center made a mistake related to the church’s accommodation and famously corrected it after the building was built.
Update: The original link is dead, but In Focus has collected 20+ photos of nail houses in China, where development is happening quickly.
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
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)
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