Norwegian artist and photographer Ida Skivenes has made a name for herself on Instagram for her playful photographs of food. While most people may attempt to make their food look photogenic and/or appetizing in photographs, Skivenes chooses to go a different route: she views her plate as a canvas and her food as her medium. Skivenes regularly creates artworks on her plates using her foods.
In September 1933, LIFE magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt traveled to Geneva to document a meeting of the League of Nations. One of the political figures at the gathering was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitlers most devout underlings and a man who became known for his "homicidal anti-Semitism."
Here's something that may not be relevant to most of you, but if you enjoy dabbling in do-it-yourself gear hacks you might find it interesting. Milan-based photographer and freelance engineer Andrea Biffi came up with an interesting way of creating a shutter release cable connector for his Canon DSLR. Instead of buying an actual remote and slicing off the plug end, he decided to cast his own out of hard rubber.
Social photo sharing, especially where location services are involved, is tricky. As we saw with the Color app debacle, privacy concerns rule all and no amount of pre-release hype and funding can overcome those. Still, as TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler said on his blog, "a killer social photo album service" should exist, and Albumatic is making a bid for that designation.
If you sell a number of prints of a photograph as a "limited edition," should you be allowed to later reprint that photo in a different size, format, or medium and then sell the new pieces as a new edition? Apparently the US legal system believes the answer is "yes."
A judge has dismissed the lawsuit filed against photographer William Eggleston by art collector Jonathan Sobel, who claimed that Eggleston's decision to sell new prints of old photos hurt the value of the original "limited edition" prints.
Photographer Alexandra Sandu is on a mission with her photos: she wants to put a smile on people's faces and make people who see her images feel good about their lives. Since September 2009, Sandu has been working on a portrait series titled Daydreamers.
For each of the portraits, the photographer asks her subject to close his or her eyes and think about something beautiful. The instruction is reminiscent of Peter Pan: "Just think happy thoughts."
Most smartphone photography apps are all about three things: taking, editing and sharing. ThrowBack, however, isn't about any of them. Instead of focusing on taking your photos and enjoying them now, the ThrowBack app wants you to "forget your memories so they can be remembered again."
Want to turn your friend's Facebook photograph into a mug to sip your morning coffee from? A new service called Photos At My Door can help you do that. It's an app that can access any of your Facebook friends' public photographs and turn them into products ranging from photo prints and canvases to mugs and mouse pads.
If the thought of having your photos sold as commercial products without your permission makes you uncomfortable, you're not alone: the app is attracting criticism for it's apparently flippant views on photo copyrights.
Photographer Benjamin Von Wong likes to push the boundaries of what he does, and lately that pushing has involved playing with fire ... literally. It seems he's taken a liking to working with pyrotechnicians and creating out of this world long exposures doing it, so after a speaking engagement in November of last year, Von Wong put together an open photo shoot with pyrotechnician Andrey DAS and fashion designer Virginie Marcerou.
Anyone and everyone was invited, and in all they were able to get a group of about 50 people to show up as they lit up the freezing night with everything from smoke grenades, to sparklers, to ropes of fire.
Zoe Spawton earns a living working as a waitress in Berlin. While setting up the restaurant's sidewalk furniture at 9am, the 29-year-old Australian photographer regularly encounters Ali, an 83-year-old man who always seems to dress fashionably and obviously takes great pride in his appearance.
After a few weeks of befriending Ali, Spawton began to document the man's outfits through portraits reminiscent of The Sartorialist. Soon, these portraits became a full blown project titled What Ali Wore.
The Touch is a Mac app created by Arctic Whiteness that allows photographers and videographers to get a better handle on Lightroom and Final Cut Pro X by adding extensive touch gesture functionality.
Using The Touch and either a magic trackpad or the company's free iPad app, you never have to take your eyes off your work in order to tweak it. You can adjust sliders, move through photos, and even set star ratings without ever glancing down at the keyboard or digging through side panels.
In 1965, amateur photographer Marc Weinstein used a fake press pass to get police to escort him stage-side at the historic Beatles concert in Shea Stadium. Now, almost 50 years later, he has sold all 61 of the images he captured there for a whopping £30,000 (or about $45,500). The story involves a little bit of bravery, a little bit of trickery, and a lot of luck.
Here's a bit of silly humor as we're winding down the workweek: if you're a photography enthusiast who has fond memories of playing Pokemon Snap during the days of the Nintendo 64, then you might enjoy this humorous fake trailer by Gritty Reboots, which takes popular movies, TV shows, video games and turns them into cinematic trailers.
This one imagines what a live-action Pokemon Snap movie would be like.
If you want a taste of how fast technology progresses in the world of digital photography, just look at the consumer camera industry through the lens of a company that continues to make a big splash: Apple.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, cameras on phones were horrible and viewing those shoddy pictures was a pain. Then, almost overnight, the smartphone photography revolution -- and the slow demise of the compact camera -- began.
Warning: This article contains powerful and emotional content that may be difficult to view
I knew the first minute I saw Jennifer that she was the one. Jen was beautiful and the kind of person that everyone wants in their life: she listened, and when you talked with her you felt like you were the only person who mattered.
A few months later I finally worked up the courage to ask Jen out, telling her, "I have a crush on you." At the time Jen was living in New York and I was in Cleveland. We talked on the phone for hours and wanted to know everything about each other; after 6 months of long distance dating I moved to New York.
There's a humorous new photography meme emerging from Japan. Students in the country are shooting photos that look like they're 'Kamehameha' scenes from the popular manga and anime franchise Dragon Ball.
In each shot, one participant poses as a character exploding with energy, while one or more other subjects pretends to be blown away by the force of the blast. As with all of the popular memes that have emerged in recent years, participants are jumping onboard by shooting their own photos and then sharing them on the web.
Sony has used its "Cyber-shot" brand for digital cameras since 1996, and from 2008 to 2009 the company also slapped the brand on its Sony Ericsson camera phones. Now, with the smartphone industry investing heavily in camera technologies, Sony may soon be reintroducing the brand to its Xperia smartphones in order to compete against other photo-focused phones.
Check out this one-of-a-kind music video for the song "Could Be Me" by the band Gunnar and The Grizzly Boys. The video is titled "Redneck Country Band Ambushes Google Street View Car!," and appears to be a music video shot entirely through the cameras of Google's Street View cars.
South African photographer Anthea Pokroy is a self-proclaimed "ginger," and has been on a mission to photograph other redheaded people in order to create a series of images about identity, prejudice, racial classification, segregation, and elitism.
The project is titled "I Collect Gingers," and has grown to over 500 portraits since it launched in August 2010. Red hair is a relatively rare trait that occurs naturally in 1-2% of the human population.
The folks at Panasonic just developed an exciting new sensor technology that could significantly improve low light performance in all types of cameras very soon. Calling it a sensor technology is a bit misleading, however, because no improvements have been made to the actual sensor at all; instead, Panasonic has decided to change what sits in front of the sensor: the traditional color filter.
Google takes photos pretty seriously. In addition to schmoozing the photography community earlier this week by releasing the entire Nik collection of plugins for only $150, the company also promised to make the cameras in their phones "insanely great." And a recent patent shows one of the ways Google may go about doing that.
Due to the tragic Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami and nuclear disaster that it caused, the 21,000 residents of Namie-machi, Fukushima, Japan had to evacuate their homes. Even now, a little over two years later, the residual radiation makes it impossible for those former residents to return to the homes and businesses they were forced to abandon.
Still, many would like to see what has become of their town in the intervening years, and so Google teamed up Namie-machi mayor Tamotsu Baba to make that wish come true. As of yesterday, the displaced residents of Namie-machi (along with the rest of us) can tour the entire nuclear ghost town digitally.
To promote the Brooklyn Brewery Mash, filmmakers Landon Van Soest and Paul Trillo put together the impressive stop motion creation you see above. The video, which was created by putting together 3,000 separate stills, takes viewers on a tour of Brooklyn by bike messenger (among other things) showing off some of the borough's highlights.
In recent years, photographers -- and particularly photojournalists -- have had to compete more and more aggressively with the everyday Joe and his smartphone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. And with technologies like CrowdOptic in the works that will help sift through the plethora of photographs taken every second, news agencies may soon be able to find that Joe in record time.
But according to an article by Jenna Wortham of The New York Times, one branch of photography is already taking a significant hit: the paparazzi are being replaced by Instagrammers. Using a recent photo of Beyoncé and her daughter as an example, Wortham shows how the paparazzi are already losing their battler with those same amateurs.
When was the last time you received a compliment for how beautiful your camera bag is? Do you dread carrying your gear to activities and events due to the fact that your bag completely clashes with your fashion sensibilities? Are you a man?
If you answered "yes" to that last question, camera bag company ONA wants to change your answer for the first two.
For a while now we've been sharing photos beamed home by NASA's rovers on Mars. From panoramas by the old timer Opportunity to selfies by the new kid Curiosity, we're starting to see more and more of the Red Planet many millions of miles away. Andrew Bodrov, however, has taken it to the next level.
In a recent Photoshop blunder, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) was caught distributing the above doctored photo of a marine military exercise involving hovercraft. The photo, which was originally distributed to several news outlets, claimed to show the prowess of North Korea's marine force.
It didn't take long, however, for several news agencies to start pointing out some anomalies that all indicated the photo had been doctored.
Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, my great grandfather started a printing and publishing business in Philadelphia, which, for many, many years was one of the finest and most successful letterpress shops in that city. Nearly every male descendant of Charles Jefferson Armor, including my great uncle, my grandfather, and my father, worked there for most if not all of their lives.
I recall with great fondness the occasional Saturday mornings when I would accompany my dad into work, stopping first at the Horn and Hardart automat at 8th and Market St. for cream donuts and hot chocolate. Incidentally, and an interesting tangent to my story here, H&H (as it was known for nearly a century) closed its doors in Philly forever in the late 70‘s. It was another victim of the fast food craze being led by more ubiquitous, lower cost chains like McDonald’s, whose shiny new franchise quickly occupied the automat’s former space at 8th and Market.
Photographer David Orias of Santa Barbara, California photographs waves with a slow shutter speed, capturing their movement, color, and power as they roll in from the Pacific Ocean.
In October of 1967, at the age of 24, Charlie Haughey received a draft notice from the US Army notifying him that he would be spending a tour of duty in Vietnam as a rifleman. A couple of months after he arrived, his commanding officer put a camera in his hands and asked him to start taking pictures for Army and US newspapers. His only instructions: "You are not a combat photographer. This is a morale operation ... "
Haughey brought back nearly 2,000 negatives from Vietnam, shot between March 1968 and May 1969, none of which ever saw the light of day until very recently.
'Showrooming' is something that's having a big effect in the camera equipment industry and something that many brick-and-mortar retailers are trying to address. It's when consumers walk into a store not with the intention of actually purchasing a camera or lens, but instead to play around with them and evaluate them in person before making the actual purchase for a lower price online.
One store over in Brisbane, Australia has come up with a novel strategy (but not so consumer friendly) for combatting showrooming. To ensure that only customers looking to purchase products walk through their doors, the store is charging a $5 fee just to browse its wares.
A neat way to capture the passage of time is to photograph one scene multiple times throughout a day, slice up the resulting photos, and then combine them into a single composite image showing all the different hours as slices. In the past we've shown examples of this technique done in cities and with sunsets.
Chinese photographer Wei Yao of Reuters used this same concept, but instead of shooting photos over a number of hours, his image spans days. Instead of focusing on the passage of time, his image highlights Beijing's serious pollution problem.
My name is David Lo, and I am a street photographer who enjoys taking vintage cameras, digitizing them, and then using them for street photography. This is a walkthrough on my process of modifying a camera.
Photographer Ernie Button has a unique project called Vanishing Spirits in which he photographs the bottom of Scotch glasses once the whisky has evaporated way. The residue creates textures and colors that make the photographs look as though they're images of otherworldly planets.
100 million users are uploading 40 million photographs on a daily basis to Instagram. Of these images, 43% of them dont have any retro filters applied to them. That leaves 22.8 million filtered photos hitting the social network every 24 hours.
Marketing firm Marketo recently poked around with some of Instagram's statistics, and then decided to assign personality profiles to some of the service's most popular filters. It's like Instagram meets Chinese Zodiac.
If you're the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there's something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.
At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams.
Holsters are becoming pretty popular for keeping camera gear on your hip and at the ready, and now Washington-based gear company Rhino Camera Gear wants to bring the concept to batteries. It has unveiled a new product that's designed to cut a few seconds out of the time it takes you to switch out empty batteries for fresh ones.
The accessory is called the Rhino Battery Holster, and moves your juiced batteries from inside your camera bag to your side.
My name is Chris Rusanowsky, I am a 22-year-old freelance photographer based out of Los Angeles, California. In February of 2012 I took a trip to document poverty in Manila, Philippines for 32 days.
Former Olympus president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa may soon spend up to five years of his life in prison for his role in Olympus' massive financial scandal that rocked corporate Japan back in 2011. Prosecutors allege that Kikukawa orchestrated a coverup of $1.7 billion in company losses, one of the biggest frauds in Japanese history and the country's equivalent of America's Enron scandal.
