As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.
Shooters aren’t the only ones with a difficult job, though: photo editors have it just as bad. Reuters photo editor Russell Boyce has written up a fascinating article that offers a behind-the-scenes look into the responsibilities — and mindset — of a picture editor at the Games. Read more…
Here’s a video that offers a peek into the life of a Reuters photographer covering the Olympics. It features photographers and editors on the Reuters team talking about the joys and challenges of shooting the biggest sporting event in the world. Read more…
Scott Schuman, or The Sartorialist, made it big in the blogging, photography, and fashion worlds by having his fashion street photography blog become an Internet sensation. If you think he’s unique in his subject matter, however, boy are you mistaken: he’s simply one of the most famous.
New York Magazine created this fascinating look at how the world of street fashion photography is now teeming with photographers. Read more…
This advertising photograph for the new Mini John Cooper Works GP looks like a piece of CGI artwork, but it’s a lot more photo than render. It also looks like it was shot at high speeds, but it was actually photographed at a crawl. Shot during a top-secret nighttime photo shoot at the Circuit Paul Ricard in France, the photo required long exposure photography, fake smoke, gigantic lights, and a fancy moving camera rig. Read more…
Photographer Martin Schoeller recently photographed American swimmer Ryan Lochte for the July 30th issue of TIME magazine. The behind-the-scenes video above offers an interesting glimpse into how the images were made. Read more…
Have you ever wondered how Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson made Frodo Baggins the hobbit so much smaller than Gandalf the wizard? Aside from using CGI and child body doubles, the filmmaking team also employed brilliant forced perspective techniques that tricked viewers with optical illusions. Read more…
Last year we shared the work of artist Frank Kunert, a man who builds and photographs extremely detailed tongue-in-cheek miniature worlds that look rather ordinary upon first glance. This short behind-the-scenes video shows how he goes about creating his images, driven both by a perfectionism and a design to not do any post-processing on his analog images. You can check out Kunert’s work over on his website.
Sports photographers sitting close to the action occasionally take a beating when athletes leave their field of play. This happened yesterday to Reuters photographer Mike Segar while he was shooting the Olympic basketball game between Spain and Australia. While trying to dive for a loose ball, Spain’s Rudy Fernandez slammed into Segar and injured his head. Segar has written up an interesting post on what it was like to suddenly find the cameras pointed at him:
As the smoke cleared and I looked up, Fernandez was basically lying in my lap head down eyes closed. He rolled forward slightly, moved his hands to his head, moaned loudly and stopped moving. He was in my lap, clearly injured on his head. I could see blood on his fingers on top of his head and apparently he was now unconscious for a few seconds, or nearly so. At this point I was not a photographer. I suppose I just kind of instinctively rubbed his arm and shoulder, kept my hands on his back and held him a bit and said “stay still, stay still man… You’re all right.” I didn’t actually know if he WAS all right at all, but all I could do was to try to comfort him for the 20 or 30 seconds it took the Spain trainers, players and staff to rush to his aid. Anyone would do the same for anyone else injured in their lap, right?
I looked up and realized that fellow photographers and TV crews were shooting the incident from all possible angles. I was in the center of this wreckage but I was not really hurt. A camera with a wide angle lens was somewhere in the strewn mess of my equipment at my side and for a moment I thought to try to find it and take pictures, but with Fernandez lying bleeding on my feet and me the only one trying to help a bit, that wasn’t going to happen.
Image credits: Photographs by Christian Petersen/Getty Images, Richard Mackson/USA TODAY, Richard Mackson/USA TODAY, and Eric Gay/Associated Press (clockwise from top left)
Here’s a beautiful behind-the-scenes video that takes us on an adventure with Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen as he shoots extreme skiing at the foot of Mont Blanc. Bendiksen was testing the Leica S2 medium-format DSLR — typically thought of as a studio camera — to see how it stands up in harsh outdoor environments. Read more…
Ian Ruhter is a Los Angeles-based photographer that creates massive wet plate photographs using a giant camera van. We featured a popular short film about his work back in April, and now here’s another short behind-the-scenes look by Laura Austin. Austin followed Ruhter around for a day to see how he creates the images in his project, titled “Silver & Light“. One interesting thing we find out is that some police officers aren’t too friendly towards giant mobile cameras.
