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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.
I’ve got a few stories about the Winter Olympics open in tabs, so in the interest of getting rid of them:
- Photographer Vincent Laforet discusses his process in getting the photographs he wants.
- How the broadcast graphics were done for NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.
- The Nation on what went wrong with NBC’s coverage.
- Here’s the New Yorker’s take on the TV coverage.
Finally, Gelf Magazine compares Olympic predictions with the actual results. The media outlets surveyed all predicted higher medal counts for the US, but weren’t off by that much (aside from the ridiculous AP predicitons). Only NBC and Nike were surprised that Bode Miller sucked so royally.
A statement on art statements. “I have no way of actually proving this, but I am convinced that many photographers do not have all that stuff from their statements in their heads and then go out to shoot the photography. I have the suspicion that some of them, after having shot their photos, have a hard time writing something that can pass as a statement, because ‘I just wanted to take beautiful photos of rubble piles’ somehow doesn’t appear to be acceptable.”
Canon, Sony, and Nikon top the list of the most-used camera on Flickr. Nokia is #11.
Were you up on the High Line on Feb 20? Did you lose your digital camera? It’s been found…claim it on Craigslist.
Edward Burtynsky and World Changing have collaborated on a video using his photographs to depict humanity’s impact on the planet. Burtynsky has pledged $50,000 from his 2005 TED Prize (as has the Sapling Foundation) to match donations to World Changing. More information on the TED blog.
Rob at Cockeyed is building a photographic height/weight grid, effectively a catalog of people’s body types. Description and call for entries here.
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