A recent Washington Post article has drawn attention to a new trend that is arising among young girls on Instagram; a trend that has both parents and child safety advocates worried. The trend is Instagram beauty pageants, in which young girls submit pictures of themselves using hashtags like #beautycontest or #rateme, and subject themselves to the praise and/or ridicule of their many million Instagram peers. Read more…
The 2013 Major League Baseball season kicked off this past weekend to the delight of fans of the sport across the US and across the world. Photographer Don Hamerman hasn’t attended a ball game in over a decade, but he has a photo project that baseball enthusiasts may find quite interesting. It’s a series titled Baseballs that shows off the beauty and diversity of found baseballs that were discarded after their usefulness was gone.
Read more…
Skin care company Dove is speaking out on the issue of “fake beauty” being promoted in photographs through Photoshopping. Rather than address the issue directly at first, the company decided to speak out directly to those responsible for “fake” images by doing some clever guerrilla marketing. It essentially pranked retouchers through the Web by releasing a fake Photoshop beauty Action that undoes manipulation rather than creates it.
Read more…
The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of daguerreotype photographs captured over the past two centuries. In addition to browsing the technically perfect ones that document history and people, it’s also interesting to look at metal plates that are flawed.
Read more…
We’ve all used a little bit of Photoshop magic to take care of a blemish or two when taking portraits, but Sony’s newly announced Smart Skin Evaluation Program (SSKEP) is taking on blemishes in a whole new way. The sensor technology, which was announced just a few days ago, can actually go beyond skin-deep and take a peek at blemishes that haven’t even surfaced yet.
Read more…
Beauty retouching on still photographs of faces is both ubiquitous and controversial in some industries. You’ve likely seen your fair share of tutorials and demonstrations that show amazing feats of Photoshop, but did you know that the same ‘shops can be done on video? And not just any video, mind you: 4K video.
A Japanese company called Foton Inc. claims that it has developed a new retouching technique that can be applied to 4K video, without damaging the quality and without having to compress the video first. The above demo of the technology is astonishing.
Read more…
Photographer John Eklund spent the past year visiting various locations in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, using his camera to document the stunning beauty of places ranging from Crater Lake in Oregon to Mount St. Helens in Washington. He writes,
I am a photographer from Portland, Oregon. I want to share the beautiful NW region through my eyes with time-lapse photography. I choose to shoot locations that appeal to the way I would like to interpret the story of time. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are endless opportunities to document the magnificence of the world around us. I have discovered that when time is the storyteller, a special kind of truth emerges.
Eklund ended up shooting approximately 260,000 photographs that weighed a whopping 6.3 terabytes. His gear list included a Canon 5D Mark II, two 5D Mark IIIs, a 24mm f/1.4 II, a 16-35mm f/2.8 II, a 24-70mm f/2.8, and a couple tripods and dollies. He says that his secret to creating time-lapse videos is trial and error, having spent “hours upon hours” trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. We’d say he’s gotten it figured out. Wouldn’t you?
Here’s a beautiful short film by Arden Oksanen titled “Pictures of a Cowboy”. It’s about the life and work of Carl Oksanen, a cowboy-turned-photographer who documented the beauty of Wyoming through stunning landscape photographs. Prepare to be inspired.
(via Reddit)
Here’s a stunning super slow motion video that shows Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua of Staatsballett Berlin performing several jumps. The footage was captured at 1000 frames per second.
Filmmaker Jesse Rosten created this satirical commercial for Fotoshop by Adobé with the tagline “This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.” It’s a humorous response to how the beauty industry has distorted our society’s perception of beauty through ubiquitous Photoshopping. The video may or may not be work safe, depending on where you work.
(via Fstoppers)
