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 — 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.
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 — 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 — in the video he ages 2 months every second and 10 years a minute.
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.
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 — 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 — 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 — “a photograph sounds like a kiss”. (thx, david)
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.
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.
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.
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 — miners maintained a lifelong right of residence to their quarters — creating a stark split between the left and right sides of the structure.
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:
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 — 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)
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)
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 — which allowed him to capture a much faster “shutter speed” than traditional wet plates — 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.
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.↩
Photographer James Crombie and his friend Colin Hogg captured an amazing moment over Lough Ennell in County Westmeath, Ireland on Tuesday: a murmuration of starlings that, for a split second, looked like a huge bird. Crombie took the photo and Hogg the video:
Crombie made, he thinks, about 50 trips to Lough Ennell in the past few months. “I’m usually a sports photographer, so for a while I’ve had a bit of time to think about other things. I had an image in my head,” he explains. “I could see they were making shapes. I kept going back, to get the image I had in my head.”
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Finally, at about 6pm on Tuesday, Crombie focused his Canon EOS-1D X Mark III and got the image he wanted. That night alone he shot between 400 and 500 frames before capturing this unforgettable photograph. “It paid off,” he says.
I know there has to be a word for a collection of things that looks like an individual member of the group (like the school of fish in Finding Nemo) but I can’t find it right now. Anyone know? Or have a good suggestion? (thx, aaron)
Projection is a short film by Joseph Holmes of clips from 50 different films that take place in movie theater projection rooms. This supercut was made to accompany Holmes’ series The Booth, a collection of photos from 2012 that document the disappearing/changing movie theater projection rooms.
Aspreviouslydocumented, I am a big fan of satellite images taken from a low angle. Planet Labs’ Robert Simmon wrote a post that talks about the history and uses of low-angle satellite imaging and shares many examples (like the two above of the Hoover Dam and Paris).
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