September 2012

Gallery Drops Photo Artist After Works Found to Be Sourced From Stock

Tim Olsen Gallery, a prestigious art gallery located in Sydney, Australia, has dropped popular Australian photo artist Ben Ali Ong after it was discovered that some of his photo artworks were actually based on uncredited Getty Images. An exhibition featuring Ong's work, which was set to open this week, was canceled, and a number of art buyers will be refunded.

Striking Black and White Portraits of Art Painted on Faces

Moscow-based photographer Alexander Khokhlov has a striking series of portraits of models with various designs painted onto their faces. The faces are either painted completely black or completely white, and then used as a canvas for some kind of artwork (e.g. a Mickey mouse face, a silhouette, a keyhole). Khokhlov calls the series Weird Beauty.

Time-Lapse Videos of Old B&W Photos Being Infused with Color

Earlier this year, we shared some amazing work by Swedish retoucher Sanna Dullaway, who takes historical B&W photographs and colorizes them. YouTube user IColoredItForYou is another master of restoring, retouching, and colorizing, but what's awesome about his work is that he creates behind-the-scenes videos showing how the edits are done. The above time-lapse video shows how he recently used Photoshop to colorize Margaret Bourke-White's famous 1937 photograph, titled "Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky".

Photog Arrested for Chasing Bieber Now Fighting California Anti-Paparazzi Law

Freelance paparazzi photographer Paul Raef was arrested back on July 6th after chasing Justin Bieber on 101 Freeway, becoming the first person charged under a new anti-paparazzi law signed by former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Raef is currently facing four misdemeanors, with two of them being "following another vehicle too closely and reckless driving, with the intent to capture pictures for commercial gain." The punishment is up to one year in jail and $3,500 in fines.

The Los Angeles Times reports that his lawyers are now trying to have the anti-paparazzi law declared as unconstitutional, saying that it specifically and unfairly targets a certain group of news gatherers.

Photograph of a Face Created by Carefully Arranging Food on a Table

The folks at Mexican agency Golpeavisa were recently tasked with creating a portrait of world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi for a cover of ClasePremier magazine. Instead of doing a digital illustration like they've done before, they decided to flex their creative muscles and try their hand at making a portrait out of food using perspective photography. After a good deal of planning and setting up, the cover above is what resulted.

Linkin Park Browser-Based Music Video Incorporates Your Facebook Photos

Linkin Park has released a new music video that makes creative use of online photos. Visit the website for the song "Lost in the Echo", and you'll be asked to connect with the music video using your Facebook account. Once you provide it with access, it crunches some data, and then starts playing. The video starts out like many other videos, showing a group of people in what appears to be some kind of post-apocalyptic hideout. Then one of the characters pulls out a suitcase with photos, and something catches you eye: personal photos from your Facebook albums are shown inside the video!

Leaked Fujifilm XF1 Video Shows Twist-To-Turn-On Feature

Fujifilm has uploaded a video to its Japanese YouTube account showing its not-yet-announced XF1 (or XP1) retro-styled compact camera. The video shows that there's a twisting feature that's used to turn the camera on and off. Turning on the camera involves twisting the lens to unlock it, pulling it out of the camera until it clicks, and then rotating it some more to open up the lens cover. Turning it off involves doing the same things in reverse.

Bizarre Portraits of People With the Back of Their Heads as Beards

Upside Down (Faces) is a bizarre portrait project by Milano, Italy-based photographer Davide Tremolada. The photos show the front and back sides of individuals digitally blended into a single head, with the backside of the head serving as a giant beard. The resulting look is quite surreal, especially if the subject already had a beard to begin with.

Kirby Ferguson on How Creativity Comes from Without, Not from Within

Try imagining a make-believe creature that has absolutely no basis in reality. Can you? Not really. The truth is, everything imaginary is simply a rehash of things that actually exist... just in a combination that doesn't exist. Aliens are simply strange combinations of humans and other creatures that we know. Unicorns are horses with horns. Bigfoot is some guy that accidentally spilled Rogaine all over his body.

This is the basis for writer Kirby Ferguson's big idea: that "everything is a remix." He created a popular four part video series on this topic over the past year, and recently he was invited by TED to give the condensed, sub-10-minute version of it that's shown above.