Heartwarming video alert: soccer fans snapping photos inside a London Olympics 2012 photo booth were given a surprise of a lifetime when soccer legend David Beckham randomly poked his head in. The video above — created by Adidas — captures the priceless reactions of the shocked fans. See if you can spot the die-hard Beckham fan (hint: he’s young).
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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.
Photography enthusiast and retired physicist Milo Shott of Oxford, England has found a way use his love for cameras to raise boatloads of money for the poverty-fighting charity Oxfam: camera repair. 11 years ago, Shott noticed some workers at an Oxfam store throwing out an old piece of camera equipment. After saving it from the trash, he fixed it up and helped the store sell it for £270.
Since then, Shott has helped the charity repair old camera gear and sell it off at events held four times a year — events so popular that long lines form and ~$5,000 is raised in a week. In all, Shoot has helped the charity raise more than £120,000 (~$192,000) since he started.
Photographer Carli Davidson — now Internet-famous for her portraits of dogs shaking off water — has a heartwarming project titled Pets with Disabilities in which she uses portraits to tell the stories of happy dogs that have various handicaps. For the photo above:
(Corgi) Duncan has a spinal disorder that many corgis are prone to. Even though he can’t use his hind legs he is still extremely active. He throws toys across the room for himself to fetch, and his favorite treat is whipped cream.
A photographer was recently reunited with his lost photographs after another photographer happened to stumble upon them at a flea market. Photographer-turned-filmmaker Alexi Tan lost his entire photographic archive some time ago while shooting his first feature film in China. He had accidentally let his credit card expire, leading his New York-based storage company to auction off his archive.
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Real estate agents make it a point to have homes look attractive in photographs, knowing that good photography can make a huge difference, but the people at animal rescue shelters often settle for second-rate photographs of the dogs they’re trying to find homes for. Professional pet photographer Teresa Berg of Dallas, Texas realized that countless dogs are likely euthanized each year simply due to bad photography, and decided to make a difference. Several years ago she started doing shoots for a pet shelter free of charge, and helped increase the adoption rates there by 100%
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Teenage photographers Vanessa Hollander and Wilson Philippe embarked on a ten-day motorcycle trip across Mongolia this past summer on a mission to give instant photo portraits to Native Mongolians who had never seen a photo before. They also made the above video documenting the reactions of a few of their subjects:
each person photographed really prized and protected his or her polaroid (fearing that we wanted to keep it), and barely let us see it when it was developed! the children automatically stored it away once we showed them what was the very first picture of themselves. it was a really great and humbling experience and showed us how much just one photograph can mean to people who have never had one of themselves. although many people claim they want to escape this mess of technology in more delevoped countries, we often tend to take the beauty of some technology, such as photography, for granted. [#]
Unless you’re a photography-hating robot, the video should bring a smile to your face and a fuzzy feeling to your heart.
The power of the Internet is awesome when it helps reunite people with lost photos, but it’s even cooler when it uses photos to help reconnect people with relatives. That happened recently with a 71-year-old shoe shiner in China named Shufang Zhong. Zhong’s daughter had moved to a far away city five years ago, and although they could speak on the phone, her daughter desperately wanted to see her face. The problem was, Zhong had absolutely no Internet access and no idea how to reach her daughter.
On June 24th, Zhong noticed a man using an iPad and begged him to help her search online for her daughter. There wasn’t Wi-Fi in the area, so the man snapped a photograph of Zhong instead and uploaded it to Chinese microblogging service Weibo (similar to Twitter). Within just a few hours the image had attracted news organizations, celebrities, and over 100,000 “retweets”, and on June 27 the daughter came across the photo online and saw her mother’s face for the first time in five years.
(via Chengdu Daily via VentureBeat)
Update: After some further digging, it appears the story is different than how we initially reported it (and how our source reported it). We’ve updated the post accordingly. Sorry about that.
A little boy named Miles was documenting a sledding adventure with his little sister when his new camera slipped out of his hands and disappeared into the snow. As his life flashed before his eyes, the camera kept rolling and recorded the mega-cuteness that ensued.
(via Photography Bay)
Here’s a fun story that might convince you to snap all the photos you can of your kids: Alex and Donna Voutsinas were gathering photos in preparation of their wedding when Alex suddenly noticed something in one of Donna’s childhood photographs. The photo, taken 20 years earlier when Donna was 5, showed Alex’s father in the background pushing Alex in a stroller!
After visiting his mother’s house, Alex found photographs from the same day in which he and his father were wearing the same clothes, confirming that they were indeed the people in Donna’s photo.
What’s even crazier is that at the time the photo was taken, Alex and Donna lived in different countries, with Alex living in Montreal and Donna living in Florida. They eventually met each other at work, fell in love, and became another of Cupid’s success stories.
(via Boing Boing)
Image credit: Photograph by Alex and Donna Voutsinas and from WXII
