Want to see an example of what dedication to a photography project looks like? Check out The Fortieth Parallel, an ongoing series by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer Bruce Myren. It’s a set of photographs captured across the 40th degree of latitude across the United States, at every whole degree of longitude. See those markers on the Google Map above? Those are all the photo spots that Myren aims to photograph. Read more…
A decade ago, photographer Andrew Filer obtained the most detailed map of North Dakota he could find, and began a project of documenting the towns on it. Not just some of the towns, but every single named dot on the map. After years of dedicated work, Filer succeeded in photographing the entire state. He ended up visiting over 850 different locations and snapping 9,308 photographs. Read more…
Artist Maarten Baas has a project called “Real Time” in which he creates one-of-a-kind clocks using a video camera and boatloads of patience and dedication. He creates 12-hour-long loops of people manually setting the time on various clocks… in real time. The video above shows his grandfather clock exhibit in which the hour and minute hands of the clock are painstakingly drawn in every minute of every hour for twelve hours. Read more…
For a fine arts project at his university, art student Joel Brochu spent a whopping 8 months meticulously recreating a photograph using tiny nonpareils (the tiny sprinkles used on cakes and donuts). 221,184 individual sprinkles were placed on the 4-foot-wide board, which was covered with double-sided tape and a thin layer of glue. Each sprinkle was placed by hand using jewelry tweezers. Read more…
Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It’s even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen. Read more…
Daily photo projects have become quite popular as of late, and a number of viral time-lapse videos feature people who take one self-portrait a day over many years. However, if you think taking a photo every day requires a crazy amount of dedication, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
For an entire year, from April 11, 1980 through April 11, 1981, legendary performance artist Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock and took a self-portrait every hour (i.e. 24 times a day) on the hour. At the end of the year, he ended up with 8,760 photos and combined them into a time-lapse video showing the passing of a year (and the growth of his hair). Now that’s crazy!
Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn’t 1,000 bucks for that a robbery? Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of “robbery”.
When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph. Read more…
Kodachrome film officially died at the end of last year when the last developer — Dwayne’s Photo Service — stopped accepting the film. Before that final nail in the coffin was pounded in, 53-year-old Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Dwayne’s in Kansas to have 1,580 rolls developed. The total cost for the 50,000 slides? $15,798. All of the photographs were of trains.
Introduced in 1967, the Lite-Brite is a children’s toy where colored pegs are inserted into a black board and then illuminated, resembling LED lights. The new music video for the song SMS by David Crowder Band tells a love story using this toy by animating the story one photograph at a time. Someone must have spent an eternity making changes to the Lite-Brite during the making of this video. The hard work definitely paid off in the end though.
Knitting is getting quite a bit of coverage on PetaPixel this week. Just a couple days ago we featured the surreal knitting photographs of Daniela Edburg. The above is an creative commercial for natural gas by TBWA Brussels and directed by Olivier Babinet. What’s amazing is that all the stop-motion animation you see is done using wool and a team of super dedicated knitters. They’ve also released a behind the scenes video showing how the commercial was made.
I love this kind of effort because it shows you how much you can do with good ol’ fashioned hard work and perseverance.
Update: Rather than “knitting”, the process is probably better described as “un-knitting”.
