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The Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the shortlist for the 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. I’ve included a few favorites above (by Andrew McCarthy, Larryn Rae, and Stefan Liebermann) but you can check out the rest on their site. (via curious about everything)
This is fantastic: for more than 60 years beginning in 1899, Lora Webb Nichols captured and collected about 24,000 photographs of life in a small copper-mining town in Wyoming.
On October 28, 1899, Lora Webb Nichols was at her family’s homestead, near Encampment, Wyoming, reading “Five Little Peppers Midway,” when her beau, Bert Oldman, came to the door to deliver a birthday present. The sixteen-year-old Nichols would marry the thirty-year-old Oldman the following year, and divorce him a decade later. The gift, however β a Kodak camera β would change the course of her life. Between 1899 and her death, in 1962, Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small Wyoming town, whose fortunes boomed and then busted along with the region’s copper mines. What Nichols left behind might be the largest photographic record of this era and region in existence: thousands of portraits, still-lifes, domestic interiors, and landscapes, all made with an unfussy, straightforward, often humorous eye toward the small textures and gestures of everyday life.
You can browse the collection of her photos at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
Spanish photographers Anna DeviΜs and Daniel Rueda cleverly use landscapes and architectural elements to create minimalist and fun portraits of themselves. You can check out more of their work on Instagram. (via moss & fog)
The IPPA Photographer of the Year Award is open to photographers who use an iPhone or iPad to take photos, and the winners of the 2021 competition demonstrate just how capable these devices are (and how much photography is not about your equipment). I’m struck by how many of the winners were not taken with the latest phones β the grand prize winner (above, top) was shot with an iPhone 7, which came out in 2016. Photos above by Istvan Kerekes, Jeff Rayner, and Enhua Ni.
The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of the their photography competition for 2021. They also selected a top 100 from the rest of the submissions to complement the winners. The photos above are by Jerry am Ende, Sue Dougherty, and Tim Timmis. (via in focus)
Alexander Ladanivskyy recently photographed the Great Pyramid at Giza from an unusual vantage point: straight overhead with a drone. The final photo in the series is so close-up that you can see the graffiti on the stones at the tip of the pyramid. (via colossal)
For more than 21 years, Noah Kalina has taken a photograph of himself. Periodically, he makes video compilations of the photos β you’ve probably seen them here or elsewhere. For his latest video, he’s collaborated with Michael Notter (visuals) and Paul O’Mara (sound) on a video called 7777 Days.
In a first step, Michael used the machine learning library dlib (http://dlib.net/) and some custom Python code to detected in each of Noah’s photos 5 face landmarks (i.e. both eyes, the nose and the two corners of the mouth). These landmarks were then used to align the faces in all photos, so that the eyes and corner of the mouth were horizontally oriented and always an equal distance apart. After that, some small image intensity correction were applied to make very dark images a bit brighter and very bright ones a bit darker. This was followed by an upscaling of all images (where needed) to a 4K resolution.
The result is a 2-minute video (reminiscent of Jason Salavon’s work) that spans half of Kalina’s life β in the video he ages 2 months every second and 10 years a minute.
Update: Kalina and Notter explain how this video came about and how it was made.
In a family house, Mathieu Stern found a box of treasures hidden away by a little girl some 120 years ago. Inside was a pair of glass plate negative images of some pets, which Stern developed using the cyanotype technique. Film development is just straight-up magic.
Just as they did last month in capturing motherhood, The Luupe has curated a collection of photos taken by women and non-binary photographers called 100 Visions of Fatherhood. Photos above by Amanda Addison, Kari Grimsby, and Hanifa Haris.
This is a dragon’s blood tree from the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea. You can see the mathematics of nature at work here β self-similarity at different scales, growing to fill the available space, efficient branching behavior…I bet there’s some cool Fibonacci shit going on here too. The photo was taken by Daniel Kordan β you can see more of this series at Colossal, on Instagram, or at Fstoppers. (via colossal)
Photographer Sails Chong recorded something we don’t hear much of these days: the sounds of camera shutters. Accompanied by a song by Arcade Fire from the Her soundtrack, Chong presents the shutter sounds of 18 different cameras, from 35mm all the way up to large format cameras. Interestingly, the lineup does not include the iconic Leica shutter sound β “a photograph sounds like a kiss”. (thx, david)
To inspire folks to seek out their own galactic vistas, Capture the Atlas has chosen the best photos of the Milky Way for 2021. The top photo was taken by Daniel Thomas Gum in Australia and the bottom one by Larryn Rae in New Zealand. Check out the rest of the selections here.
The California Academy of Sciences has announced the winners (and finalists) of their BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition for 2021. I’ve included a few favorites above: barracuda by Yung-Sen Wu, leafcutter ants by Petr Bambousek, and lynx spiders by Lung-Tsai Wang. See all of the winners and finalists here. (via in focus)
This is a photo of a tiny tiny snippet of the universe, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Every object you see in the photo is a staggeringly massive galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars along with all sort of other things.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is well over one hundred thousand light years across. We only see a pitiful portion of it. Although it contains several hundred billion stars in its expanse, we can only see a fraction of a fraction of them.
And even that doesn’t fully capture the essence of a galaxy, which also has planets, gas, dust, dark matter, and more. Galaxies are colossal objects, their true nature only becoming apparent to us a century ago.
I know I’ve posted photos like this before, but every time I see something like this, my mind boggles anew at the sheer scale and magnitude of it all and I just have to share it.
P.S. And Earth contains the only sentient life in the entire universe? Lol.
Curated by The Luupe, this is “a collection of photographs and words celebrating the complexities of motherhood”. And somehow even 100 photographs don’t adequately capture the vast experience of motherhood around the world. Photos above by Dee Williams, Brittany Marcoux, Diane Allford (via storythings)
Jon Larsen collects and photographs micrometeorites from all over the world, finding them even in urban areas mixed in among terrestrial dust and dirt.
The cosmos is a swirling soup of stardust. Every day, approximately 60 tons of dust from asteroids, comets, and other celestial bodies fall to the Earth. These tiny metallic, alien stones of various shapes, textures, and colors-known as micrometeorites-are some of the oldest pieces of matter in the solar system.
Even though micrometeorites blanket the Earth, scientists have generally only been able to discover them in remote places devoid of human presence, such as Antarctic ice, desolate deserts, and deep-sea sediments. Scientists began searching for micrometeorites in the 1960s, and they predominantly thought the extraterrestrial dust would be impossible to find in urban environments. The conventional wisdom held that densely populated areas had too much man-made sediment that camouflaged the tiny space particles.
But Jon Larsen, a Norwegian jazz musician and creator of Project Stardust, was able to show that it is possible to find micrometeorites in more populated areas. In a study published in January 2017 in the journal Geology, he and his colleagues catalogued more than 500 lustrous micrometeorites (and counting), all recovered from rooftops in urban areas.
Check out Larsen’s Project Stardust for more photos and information on how to hunt for your own. (via the kid should see this)
Photo by Laura Rowe. Wow. Evocative of Milton Glaser’s Bob Dylan poster. (via @mathowie)
For the past several years, Annette LeMay Burke has been traveling the American West in search of disguised cell phone towers, collected in a project she calls Fauxliage.
As disguised cell phone towers proliferate, I find it ironic that instead of providing camouflage, their disguises actually unmask their true identities. The towers have an array of creative concealments. They often impersonate trees such as evergreens, palms, and saguaros. Some pillars serve other uses such as flagpoles or iconographic church crosses. Generally the towers are just simulacra. They are water towers that hold no water, windmills that provide no power, and trees that provide no oxygen. Yet they all provide five bars of service.
The photos are also available in book form. (via the morning news)
Photographer Brad Walls (Insta) makes aerial photos of people playing sports, providing a new angle on the actions of divers, gymnasts, tennis players, synchronized swimmers, and figure skaters. (via petapixel)
When the mining industry declined in the Ruhr region of Germany, workers began selling their houses…but only half of them. Colossal explains:
When the once burgeoning coal industry in Ruhrgebiet, Germany, began to decline, many of the workers’ apartments were sold off. Oftentimes, new owners only purchased half of the building β miners maintained a lifelong right of residence to their quarters β creating a stark split between the left and right sides of the structure.
Photographer Wolfgang FrΓΆhling documented a number of these split-personality houses where the two sides of the buildings have diverged post-sale, a particularly stark representation of gentrification.
Astrophotography enthusiast Andrew McCarthy took a 140-megapixel photo of the Sun yesterday and, gosh, the Sun is just so cool to look at. I don’t know if you can see it above, but there’s a little something hidden in the photo, a transiting ISS:
The full-size image is available to McCarthy’s supporters on Patreon.
For his Earth Restored project, Toby Ord digitally remastered 50 photographs of the whole Earth taken by Apollo astronauts during their missions in the 60s and 70s.
The Apollo photographs are historic works of art. So in restoring them, I sought to bring out their own beauty. I refrained from recomposing the images by cropping, or trying to leave my own mark or interpretation. Perhaps in some cases this would make a more pleasing image, but it was not my aim.
And the Apollo photographs are also a scientific record of what our Earth looks like. In particular, what it would have looked like from the perspective of the astronaut taking the shot. So rather than pumping the saturation or adjusting the colours to what we think the Earth looks like, I wanted to allow us to learn from these photographs something about how it actually appears.
Many of these shots are new to me β the Apollo program and its scientific and cultural output continue to be revelatory 50 years later.
Update: Full resolution images are available when you click through on each photo. You may have to make your browser window wider to see the link. (thx, colin)
The winners of the 2021 World Press Photo contests have been announced. Photos above (top to bottom) by Nadia Buzhan (of a woman waiting for her husband to be released from a detention center) and Luis Tato (of efforts to fight a locust invasion in Kenya). (via in focus)
Women Street Photographers started as an Instagram account founded by Gulnara Samoilova in 2017 but has since grown into a community with a website, exhibitions, and even a recently released book.
I pulled a tiny selection of photos featured on their Instagram β from top to bottom: Ora Buerkli, Laura Reid, Thouly Dosios, and Sonia Goydenko. (via colossal)
For her forthcoming book New Yorkers, photographer Sally Davies (Instagram) captured portraits of people inside their NYC apartments. I love the creativity of these living spaces, many in styles you just do not see in contemporary design magazines. You can preorder New Yorkers at Bookshop.org β it comes out April 1.
NASA’s Earth Observatory is holding a single-elimination tournament to find the best photograph taken by an astronaut from the International Space Station. Round 2 is now underway, with 16 photos duking it out for the top spot. The winners are determined by public vote, so get in there and vote for your favorites! (via @thelastminute)
Photographer Wilson Webb made these great tintype portraits of the cast of Little Women. Invented in 1851, the collodion process would have been in use during the time the movie takes place. You can read about Webb’s process at PetaPixel.
To capture the actual portraits, Webb got his hands on a 130-year-old Dallmeyer lens that he strapped to a modern large format camera, and set up 25,000 Watt-seconds worth of flash to ensure he had enough light. That’s… a lot of light. So much that Webb says his subjects “can feel a wave of heat and they can also smell the ozone that’s created when the picture’s taken.”
But despite all of this light β which allowed him to capture a much faster “shutter speed” than traditional wet plates β he still had the cast pose in a traditional fashion: facing the camera, stoic expression, sitting still for 30 seconds at a time to capture each individual frame.
You can check out the whole series of portraits at My Modern Met.
Digging this work from Noe Alonzo. The top image is from his Anime World project and the bottom from a collection of Blade Runner-esque images shot at night. His images are obviously heavily processed β he offers tutorials on his YouTube channel β but what photos aren’t? Very little comes out of the camera looking amazing, which was as true in Ansel Adams’ day as it is today. (thx, @thelastminute)
The World Nature Photography Awards have announced the winners of their 2020 competition. Thomas Vijayan’s photo of an orangutan (top) won the overall prize and I enjoyed the optical illusion created by Naomi Rose (bottom). You can see the rest of the winners in several different categories here. (via in focus)
After many years of experimentation, Spanish hairdresser Alexis Ferrer has developed a process for vibrant, full-color printing onto hair extensions, culminating in his recent collection, La Favorite (photographed by Rafael Andreu on model Emma Fuhrmann).1
Sidebar: why is it always so difficult to find out who the models are in fashion shoots like this? The articles and Instagram posts list the photographer, the stylist, the makeup artist, the assistant, and even the clothing brands but almost never the person actually being photographed (unless they are famous). Is Fuhrmann not an equal participant in the process of getting these photos just right? Seems retrograde.β©
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