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Interview with photographer Jay Parkinson about his aspiring model project. “I feel that it’s a photographic cop-out to take photos of strictly beautiful people because it’s hard to take a bad photo of a beautiful person, especially a very scripted portrait.”
Browsing recent interestingness on Flickr, I ran across these photos of women photoshopped to include glass eyes, prostheses, eyepatches, and to look like amputees. This is a practice of devotees of amputee fetishism called Electronic Surgery. More examples here, here, and here. Probably a bit NSFW.
Update: Flickr has removed the users who posted those photos. Sorry.
Photographer Michael Wolf, he of the Architecture of Density photos of Hong Kong, has a new project called 100x100, which is a series of photographs “of residents in their flats in hong kong’s oldest public housing estate”. Each of the apartments is only 100 square feet in size so the photos show a wide variety of dense living spaces.
Yet more advertising….a paparazzi photo of Lindsey Lohan made its way onto a movie poster promoting a film that starred Lohan.
John Gruber has more information on what’s going on with Aperture at Apple. Bottom line: by throwing too many engineers at the problem, they made a late project later (see The Mythical Man Month, one of my favorite business books), and after it shipped, all those extra engineers were redispersed within the company and the managers responsible for the debacle got the boot. Good stuff.
Interview with photographer Alec Soth. “I feel like a large part of photography is like a performance. And the photograph is like a document of this performance, of this encounter with the world.” Many interviews with photographers often end up sounding very similar, but I enjoy reading them anyway. (via eyeteeth)
Nabokov on Lewis Carroll and his photography: “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those photographs of him with little girls?” Nabokov aside, there’s no real evidence that Carroll did anything untoward with any of his photographic subjects. View some of Carroll’s photos here, here, and here. (via tmn)
Make your own x-rays: buy a dental x-ray machine on eBay and use it with Polaroid film. Mit photos.
For our honeymoon, we stayed right on the ocean near Tulum in the Yucatan, about two hours south of Cancun by car. Most of these photos are taken near Tulum, at Chichen Itza, or in Valladolid.
Infrared photography of some NBA players. In the photos, the uniforms are almost completely white and tattoos “pop” quite a bit, particularly on some of the more darker skinned players. (via th)
What the huh? Apple has disbanded the development team for Aperture? Gruber, tell me what I think about this.
Great set of publicity photos taken by French Ministry for Tourism of celebrities flying Air France in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. They were found at a flea market for a euro each. Includes Ursula Andress, Louis Armstrong, Henry Miller, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, a great one of Alfred Hitchcock, and one of a pre-WWII John F. Kennedy. (thx, dov)
Powerful photo essay on Chernobyl, 20 years after the accident. Photographer Paul Fusco says the damage was so great that he thought he was looking at “a different race of people”. (thx, lisa)
Set of photos depicting NYC in the 80s. Everytime I see pictures of subway cars covered with graffiti, I marvel at how clean the cars are now.
I can’t find a permanent link to it, but for the next week or so, you can see the NY Times package on the Empire State Building, which turns 75 this year. Lots of photos, rememberances, etc.
Luke Wroblewski wrote an article for Boxes and Arrows about using colors found in nature as inspiration for color palettes used in designing web sites. Unfortunately, the photos showing Luke’s examples don’t appear to be working on the site (the images have been fixed…thx, Lars), but Dave Shea published an image that illustrates Luke’s technique.
When you’re on the beach in the Caribbean as I was recently, it’s difficult for the color palette to escape your notice. I whipped up this collection of colors from some of my photos (coming soon) from Mexico:
From left to right, you’ve got the pale blue of the ocean close to shore, the light brown of the sand, the green of the lush vegetation, and the deep clear blue of the sky.
Update: A couple people asked, so here are the hex values for the above colors: 3DB8AE, FFEDD8, 396600, and 0050A2, respectively.
View the finalists of the Smithsonian’s 3rd annual photo contest. Here’s last year’s winners.
Cameratruck is a camera built out of a box van…essentially a giant pinhole camera. The negatives are almost three meters wide and are developed inside the truck/camera. The tour page has examples of photographs taken with the truck.
Photos of the top 15 city skylines in the world. Hong Kong is #1 and I can’t disagree.
3 Years 3 Minutes is a short film spanning three years of Felix Jung’s life in photos. (thx, ed)
Tiltomo groups similar Flickr photos together by theme, color, or texture.
Zach Klein reports on Riya, a photo service that does face recognition…you tag people’s faces and over time the system recognizes them without input. TechCrunch says that Riya can recognize text and other objects (like the Eiffel Tower) in photos as well. Cool.
This is a bit old (from March last year), but the most photographed city on Flickr at the time was London followed by New York, but when you take population into account, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas win for photos per capita.
If you’ve been following the lost camera story, there’s a happy ending for you…Judith got her camera back from the mean Canadian family.
PictureCloud lets you easily create 360 degree images from a series of digital camera photos…for free. (thx, paul)
Eliot Shepard has some advice for those entering a photography competition…or really, on how you might go about taking a good photo.
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