The wildly successful Kickstarter campaign Blackprints is currently at the center of a heated controversy over stolen images that has already involved one copyright dispute. It seems that the campaign’s creator, Sabrina Chun, might have taken to acquiring photos of cars off of the Internet, changing them to black and white minimalist versions, and selling them as part of this campaign. (See Update) Read more…
Art director Jim Lasser and his friend, photographer Ray Gordon, have a humorous ongoing photo project titled Namesake Motors. They observed that car makes and models often have names inspired by (or similar to) famous people or people groups, so they decided to shoot a series of images that play on words by pairing the cars with their namesakes (using the term very loosely).
The photograph above is titled, “Homer’s Odyssey.”
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Shooting portraits of strangers in cars isn’t uncommon, but have you ever tried using off-camera lighting to illuminate their faces? That’s what photographer Jonathan Castillo is doing for his ongoing series called Car Culture.
Castillo, an undergraduate BFA student at CSU Long Beach, shoots candid, artificially-lit photos of people driving around on the roads of Los Angeles. While the photos are captured from a car directly in front of the subjects, Castillo lights the scenes using a second specially-rigged vehicle driving to the side.
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Two years ago, director Ross Ching created a viral hit by showing Los Angeles in a time-lapse video in which every trace of cars and people was removed. That project was such a success that Ching tells us he’s now planning to create an entire series based on the same idea, showing what iconic cities around America would look like if the humans within them suddenly vanished. The first stop in his “Empty America” tour was San Francisco, captured beautifully in the haunting video above.
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Ever wonder how Google manages to capture street-level photographs of entire cities for its Street View? It’s done using a giant fleet of camera-equipped cars. Google employee Masrur Odinaev recently shared this photograph — taken by a Street View car — showing one of Google’s Street View car parking lots. We see a large fleet of Subaru Imprezas that have panoramic cameras mounted to the tops.
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At first glance, some of Simon Davidson‘s photographs look like Harry Potter stills showing flying cars floating in the clouds. They’re actually a glimpse into the burnout subculture that’s growing in Australia. These are competitions in which drivers try to create as much smoke as they can by spinning their tires in place.
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Photographer Alicia Rius bases much of her work around searching for “hidden treasures”. One particular series is titled “From the back seat of my car”, and consists of unplanned photographs taken from the back of abandoned cars. She writes,
The first car I found was the red one. Then, another then day while I was driving, I saw another abandoned car. I never looked for them, actually, I think they found me. I was thinking in a way to immortalize their beauty and turn the tin in something romantic. So I decided to step in… and OMG, that was really tricky! But after fighting with the spiders, the bees, hurting myself to try to squeeze my body in such a small place… it was worth it.
Photographer Martin Usborne shot a series of photographs of dogs patiently waiting in cars for their owners for his project “MUTE: the silence of dogs in cars“. He managed to capture their longing expressions quite well.
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