The latest photo to go viral on the web is a photo about photos. Lost photos, that is. Earlier today a man named Roland van Gogh shared the above image on Facebook and on Reddit, stating,
My father in law found a red Nikon Coolpix camera on 2012-06-20 in the train at the station Amsterdam Amstel in the Netherlands. His photos show a trip throughout Europe from about 2012-05-07. Since 2012-06-15 he stayed in Amsterdam.
We would like to give him back the camera and the photos. Please Like, Share and spread this photo around so we can give him back his camera! Thanks!
The image quickly racked up tens of thousands of shares on Facebook (it at nearly 40,000 at the time of this post), and some progress appears to have been made: Roland reports that he has received a lead to the woman in the photo.
Security camera clips that make the news usually show bad things, but Coke decided to “look at the world a little differently” in this heartwarming viral video. They found security camera footage from around the world showing happy moments: people stealing kisses instead of possessions, dealing potato chips instead of drugs, and offering car assistance rather than road rage.
Last Thursday, 13-year-old Addison Logan of Wichita, Kansas found something really cool at a garage sale: an old Polaroid camera for only $1 (score!). But when Addison got it home and started looking up how to use it on the internet, what he found in the cartridge was even cooler, or maybe creepier. Inside the Polaroid camera, bought from a family they don’t even know, was a picture of his uncle Scott who died some 23 years ago in a car accident: Read more…
Jack Robinson was a quiet man who mostly kept to himself, which explains why it was his boss, Dan Oppenheimer, who was left to take care of his estate when he passed. Little did Oppenheimer realize, however, that when he opened the closet in Jack Robinson’s incredibly tidy apartment, he would find a collection of pristine portraits of celebrities that Robinson shot in his early days as a commercial photographer for Vogue.
As it turns out, Robinson had acquired over 150,000 prints of famous ’50s, ’60s and ’70s icons ranging from Joni Mitchell to The Who before falling victim to alcoholism and moving to Memphis, leaving that life behind. And now interested parties will be able to get their hands on more of Robinson’s work than ever before in a book titled: Jack Robinson On Show: Portraits 1958-72. If you’re interested in seeing more of Robinson’s portraits, pay a visit to his online archives.
A fascinating story from the art world: back in 2010, British businessman Andy Fields purchased a collection of 5 paintings from a Las Vegas garage sale for $5. When he decided to have one of the paintings reframed, he discovered an early Andy Warhol sketch hidden behind it. The signed drawing is believed to be of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee and created when Warhol was just 10 years old. Warhol paintings fetch absurd prices on the auction block — the artist is considered to be the bellwether of the art market — and the sketch is estimated to be worth a whopping $2 million.
Named after the fact that Google Street View cars shoot with 9 separate cameras, Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View website is an ongoing project that publishes strange scenes photographed by Google’s automated cameras. Rafman writes,
This infinitely rich mine of material afforded my practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. To a certain extent, the aesthetic considerations that form the basis of my choices in different collections vary. For example, some selections are influenced by my knowledge of photographic history and allude to older photographic styles, whereas other selections, such as those representing Google’s depiction of modern experience, incorporate critical aesthetic theory. But throughout, I pay careful attention to the formal aspects of color and composition.
[...] I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled “the decisive moment,” as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots. I can also choose to be a landscape photographer and meditate on the multitude of visual possibilities.
Dutch illustrator Tineke Meirink likes to take a closer look at photographs and then draw whatever her playful imagination reveals to her. Her website stop:watch is a collection of these “what it is” and “what I see” comparisons. Read more…
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.
Apparently there’s a camera shop in Houston, Texas called Houston Camera Exchange that’s taking preorders for the upcoming — but yet unannounced — Nikon D800 for $2,699.99. While photos and specs of the 36MP camera have been leaking for some time now, there hasn’t been much information about the camera’s price.
Olympus recently filed a patent in Japan for a vari-angle LCD screen. While that’s not exactly groundbreaking, the illustrations in the patent appears to show some kind of medium format digital camera. What’s more, it looks nearly identical to the Samsung digital medium format prototypes that emerged earlier this year. Read more…
