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)
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kottke.org posts about photography
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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