kottke.org posts about photography
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is exploring the use of satellite imagery to detect and prove human rights abuses. It’s difficult to deny the communication potential of these images:
Larger versions of the images are available (before and after).
The images, analyzed by the AAAS staff, show two views of the settlement of Porta Farm, located just west of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The first, an archived image from June 2002, shows an intact settlement with more than 850 homes and other buildings; an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people lived in Porta Farm at the time. The second photo, taken by satellite on 6 April this year, shows that the settlement has been leveled.
International rights groups allege that the forced relocations in Zimbabwe — which affected over 700,000 people over the course of six weeks in 2005 — are an attempt by the Mugabe government to supress opposition to the current regime.
The AAAS and other organizations hope to use satellite imagery in the future as a tool in addressing the human rights abuses in Darfur, Burma, and other areas. (via rw)
The top ten stock photography cliches. “The Handshake of Synergy: You’ve made the sale and closed the deal. They can’t back out now—you shook on it!” Also, have you met Alicia or this girl?
Update: The same pigtailed girl uses Vagisil and helps teach people about Java Design Patterns for O’Reilly. (via joe, thx michael)
Plan is a photographic project by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga consisting of overhead views of apartments. “Such an unusual effect was achieved through the use of a special technique: the overall picture of a room is an aggregate of dozens fragmentary photographs taken from above, and then merged using a computer.” More here. A bit NSFW.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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