Culture

The first one I ever saw was "Chicks Who Click." It was years ago and the photography industry was predominantly male. I didn't think too much of it, but wondered (aloud at times) the wisdom of not only creating a gender based photography group, but giving it a cutesy name like "Chicks Who Click."

By naming it that, I felt they had downplayed the seriousness and professionalism of their chosen profession. They seemed to have devalued themselves from "professional photographers" to, well... "Chicks Who Click."

Smartphones and social networks have made snapping and sharing photos extremely easy to do, allowing us to preserve our memories and broadcast our experiences. It's not all positive, though: there are downsides to our snap- and selfie-happy culture.

A new study has found that 58% of people believe that "posting the perfect picture has prevented them from enjoying life's experiences."

As a result of the selfie culture boom in the past couple of years, the media is often quick …

China is a country that's known to take the Olympics (the summer ones, at least) very seriously as the nation competes for a bigger presence on the world stage. Chinese gold medal winners become instant superstars and the role models for a generation of aspiring athletes.

It turns out photography is another field in which China is trying to become a world superpower, and its efforts are bearing fruit.

It's becoming trendy to offer selfies as a feature in video games now. Just weeks after World of Warcraft added self-portraits through a new patch, the classic first-person-shooter Doom is getting the same treatment -- albeit unofficially.

There's a new mod for the game called "InstaDoom" that adds a selfie stick and 37 Instagram filters to the game, opening the door to some strange in-game photo ops.

As the selfie stick craze sweeps the nation, major museums in the United States are banning the device in order to protect both visitors and artworks.

The "selfie" has made quite an impact on our culture in the past couple of years. The word was selected as Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2013 and the keyword grew by over 2000% in the stock photo industry in 2014.

Companies have also been riding the selfie's popularity to make their products more "hip" -- Fujifilm's latest mirrorless camera is one example. The latest brand to do so is Blizzard, which is incorporating new selfie cameras into its popular World of Warcraft video game.

I grew up in Guelatao de Juárez, a Mexican village of approximately 500 people in Oaxaca's Sierra Norte. Guelatao is famous not only as the birthplace of Mexican president Benito Juárez, but also as the site of the annual Copa Benito Juárez, in which more than 200 teams of indigenous Zapotec, Mixe, and Chinantec players compete at basketball over a period of three days.

China's CCTV is reporting that more and more couples in Asia are flocking to South Korea in order to have their engagement photos captured on the sets of Korean drama TV shows. These shoots can cost upwards of $4,000 -- at least four times more than the shoots would cost in other countries.

“If you don’t want your photos stolen, don’t post them on the Internet.”

This is an argument I have heard over and over again, mostly from people who have never had their work borrowed. Which of course is like saying, “I know you were home, but if you didn’t want your belongings stolen, you shouldn’t have left your door unlocked.”

As photo sharing becomes one of the fastest growing niches in social media, a new British advertising campaign is warning kids and their parents about the dangers of sharing too much through online photo services.

Major soccer teams over in Europe may be banning selfie sticks from the stadiums, but selfies appear to be alive and well on the field. After "selfie" was named word of the year in 2013, players have been incorporating actual picture-taking into their goal celebrations.

Men who share selfies online are more likely to exhibit psychopathic tendencies. That's what researchers are saying after conducting a lengthy study on the link between selfie-taking and certain personality traits.

Want to have your own wedding photos without having an actual wedding? Apparently some people do. A Japanese travel agency called Cerca Travel has started offering a strange package this past year called the "Kyoto Solo Wedding." It's a two-day experience centered on a fake wedding shoot that's designed to pamper women and boost their self esteem.

Fashion street photographers usually look for styles that are one of a kind. Hans Eijkelboom doesn't. For over twenty years, the Dutch 'anti-sartorial' photographer has roamed the streets of major cities around the world in search for the common -- people showing similar tastes in clothing, accessories, or behavior.

The result is a monumental project called "Photo Notes", which comprises grids of photos grouped together by a common theme.

Here's a super random piece of photographic trivia: that $1 million giant Leica sculpture in Los Angeles is likely now in the possession of Minecraft founder Markus Persson (AKA "Notch").

Universal Studios in Hollywood recently offered guests a photo op with a performer dressed very impressively as Megatron, one of the main baddies in Transformers. It turns out Megatron is not a fan of selfies.

When Alexandra Trew walked up and tried to snap one, she ended up capturing this video of the villain ranting about selfies and arguing how people need to learn to live in the moment.

Earlier this year, a woman shot a video of a girl at a swimming pool who spent a considerable …

Photographer Shelley Calton grew up in Houston, Texas and was raised by a father who owned guns for both hunting and self-defense. She and her two sisters all learned to shoot firearms from a young age.

This background is something Calton shares with the subjects of her project "Concealed". It's a series of portraits that looks into the lives of women who arm themselves.

Dubai-based photographer Muhammad Hassan is coming out with a tutorial series that teaches basic to advanced photography techniques. To promote the course, he has created a very... interesting teaser video that uses special effects to dazzle the eyes and minds of prospective students.

Does photography deserve a place in art galleries? Jonathan Jones doesn't think so. The Guardian art columnist has caused quite a stir after writing a piece titled, "Flat, soulless and stupid: why photographs don’t work in art galleries."

While Jones acknowledges that photographs can be "powerful, beautiful, and capture the immediacy of a moment like nothing else," he argues that they are, "poor art when hung on a wall like paintings."

Reminiscent of the Tumblr Blog We Never Look Up, London street photographer Babycakes Romero's series The Death of Conversation focuses on our obsession connection with our smartphones.

But where the anonymous photographer behind We Never Look Up focused on anyone and everyone with their eyes glued to that little screen, Romero's series is all about highlighting the digital wall that smartphones have created between people often sitting so close to each other they're touching.

We received a tip today from a reader who asked us to take a look at the official portraits for the Miss World Philippines 2014 candidates. The tipster had harsh things to say about the images, saying the creator, "must've been bored or high when he post-processed these photos."

Photographer and filmmaker Matthew Frost recently teamed up with actress Kirsten Dunst to …

Following in the footsteps of the New York Times' Lens Blog, The Washington Post has launched something called In Sight: a photoblog focused on presenting the world through visual narratives.

Two months ago we shared with you the interesting experiment by journalist Esther Honing that involved taking one photograph and having people from 27 countries Photoshop it to end up with what they considered to be their countries definition of beautiful.

Fellow journalist and friend of Honig's Priscilla Yuki Wilson wanted to try the same thing, and see how her biracial ethnicity would affect the outcome.

As light painting photography is becoming more popular and common, photographers are coming up with better and better ways of bringing the technique to events. The Lightomatic is a fancy solution by Dazler, a collective of light painters based out of Lyon, France.

From the outside it looks like your average high-end photo booth, but it's one that allows users to make a creative light painting self-portrait print on the spot.

Do you have dreams of being an outspoken reviewer of photography books? Certain provinces of Iran might not be the best place for you to launch that career. A pair of Iran photographers were recently sentenced to a total of 75 lashes for publishing negative reviews about an official's photography book.

Receiving a lot of praise today is musician Colbie Caillat, who is using her newest EP and music video to speak out against the undue pressure that Photoshopped and make-up-made perfection puts on all women.

Coming from one of the masters of time-lapse photography, "Welcome to Doha," by Michael Shainblum is a brilliant piece of work that shows off the beautiful capital of Qatar as only Shainblum can.

At an estimated 60,000 years old, the indigenous culture of Australia, the Aboriginals, are estimated to be the oldest still-surviving culture on the planet. And in the above video world-renown photographer Amy Toensing shares her experience photographing this incredibly unique culture for National Geographic, delivering an extremely heartfelt talk about the hardships the Aboriginal culture has continually faced since their land was colonized in 1788.

An incredible short film series is coming to life thanks to the production prowess of Helio Collective and iconic camera brand Leica. Called "Let Us Roam," the series tells the stories of photographers, artist, filmmakers and musicians, all within the subculture of skateboarding.

i find this curious – two photos from today, one edited so my skin is perfect …

Brandon Thibodeaux (b.1981) is a photographer based in Dallas, Texas who creates portraits in the documentary tradition. In addition to his assignment work and creative commissions, he explores life in the American south. He is a member of the photography collective MJR, based in New York City.

“The avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those in 1917. We are experiencing the end of …

Almost 25 years later, the country of Romania is still in the midst of a difficult transformation from one of the region’s hardest dictatorships to a modern European nation. A transformation that photographer Tamas Dezso masterfully captures in his series Notes for an Epilogue.

A few days ago, we shared photographer Sasha Leahovcenco's inspirational project in which he photographed people in Siberia who had never had their photo taken. Photographer Jimmy Nelson's series/book Before They Pass Away is similar in that he, too, is probably photographing people who have never seen a camera.

But the project takes on a deeper, more tragic meaning as well. You see, as the name suggests, Before They Pass Away is about capturing photographs of ancient tribes and cultures that, before long, may no longer exist to be photographed.

I grew up without the Internet.

When I was young and starting out in the business, I had no Internet, although I did have a computer. It was an Apple IIe. I felt very fancy with it, kind of like Matthew Broderick in "War Games." To me, it was like a big expensive calculator because I only used it to run reports and for record keeping. When it came to photography and the running of a business, I had to obtain information from classes and teachers, and by doing research via those archaic inventions called "books" -- you might have heard of them.

Ever wonder why people in old paintings and photographs generally don't have smiles on their faces? We explored this subject a little back in November 2012, and found that reasons may have included technical limitations, oral hygiene, and the seriousness of formal occasions.

Over at the Public Domain Review, Nicholas Jeeves has written up an in-depth piece on this subject that comes to some different conclusions.

New York City-based photographer Supranav Dash is interested in India's occupations -- not the rich and glamorous ones, but the ones held by those who are lower in the society's Caste System.

For nearly 200 years, certain groups of people were not allowed to deviate far from their family's prescribed occupations. However, in recent years things have started changing. Many of the common age-old tradesmen jobs are rapidly disappearing, and Dash is using his photography to document them before they vanish completely.