As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.
Shooters aren’t the only ones with a difficult job, though: photo editors have it just as bad. Reuters photo editor Russell Boyce has written up a fascinating article that offers a behind-the-scenes look into the responsibilities — and mindset — of a picture editor at the Games. Read more…
You know the infinitely long tunnel that appears when you look into two mirrors that are pointed at one another? Have you ever noticed that the tunnel becomes more and more green, the deeper you go?
YouTube personality Vsauce has a fascinating new video titled “What Color Is A Mirror?”. In it, Mr. Sauce explains that this is due to the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect mirror (i.e. a mirror that perfectly reflects 100% of light). The fact is, a typical mirror best reflects light in the 510nm range, which we perceive as green light. Read more…
The man in the moon and the face on mars. These are both the result of a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, which involves the brain trying to perceive random signals as significant. It’s one of the brain’s face detection mechanisms, and causes us to see faces where they don’t actually exist — the Virgin Mary’s face on toast, for example.
Programmer Phil McCarthy decided to play around with the idea of paredoila in artificial intelligence, and created a program called pareidoloop. It uses face detection algorithms to “see” human faces in randomly generated polygons. Read more…
Freelancers often have to deal with the difficult challenge of trying to satisfy vaguely stated requests from clients, and also the frustration of meeting new requirements that aren’t revealed until after the work is “completed”. The video above is an interesting social experiment by Don’t Get Screwed Over that attempts to show people what these freelance horror stories feel like to the people getting “screwed over”. Read more…
Photography enthusiast Sterling Parker created this abstract image by averaging all the photographs he shot in 2007. He tells us,
I have my photos arranged by month, and starting in January 2007, I imported all those photos into GIMP (the freeware image editor) as layers, adjusted the whole canvas to be as big as the largest dimension, then used a custom script to “average” all the layers so each one is an equal relative percentage of the whole. The white background is empty space around photos obviously, and you can see that I took more pictures in landscape than portrait.
After doing that for each month, I averaged all the months together (about 8 months total because I didn’t take pictures some months of that year) and then averaged all the months together. Overall, I’d say this is an average of about 350 photos.
It’s interesting how the image reveals both his preferences for portrait/landscape orientation and also his different camera resolutions.
Image credit: Photograph by Sterling Parker and used with permission
Want to see what it was like to be a participant in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics? One 26-year-old participant decided to build a hidden camera into his/her costume, capturing this awesome footage showing a performer’s perspective of the show.
Swedish YouTube user AnteboyanRox received an interesting surprise after purchasing a brand new HP laptop recently. After finding the operating system already configured, he/she discovered the above video sitting inside the “My Documents” folder. Apparently an assembly line worker at a factory in China was testing the laptop’s camera and then forgot to wipe it afterward. Chinese manufacturing companies are generally quite secretive, so candid videos like this one aren’t easy to come by. Last year something similar happened to camera megastore B&H.
When people think of models they typically think of people like Natasha Poly. Even with her “missing arm” on this month’s Vogue Russia, she still fits the stereotype: stunning, skinny and tall. But those aren’t the kinds of models UGLY MODELS Modeling Agency is interested in. No, according to the agency’s website, UGLY MODELS prefers “a look with true character.”
With over 1,000 models on our books ranging from 18-100 years old, sizes 6-30, we have the most individual, wacky and peculiar looks in the industry; from trannies to grannies, burlesque to bikers, wee folk to rock blokes! We have the rarest and most eye-catching individuals in the country.
Needless to say, if you happen to be looking for models that break the mold for your next shoot, it might not be a bad idea to give UGLY MODELS a shout.
Rich Kids of Instagram is a website that collects Instagram photographs taken by young people who “have more money than you”. It’s a filtered look into the lives of people who zip around in private jets and receive Porsches as presents.
Why My Photographs Are Bad is a photography book for beginners first published in 1902 by a man named Charles Maus Taylor. The book contains many of the same basic tips that can be found in introductory books these days, but also many that are very specific to the way photography was done at the time. Here’s a selection of common mistakes that newbie photographers were making over 100 years ago. Read more…
