Between 2009 and 2011, Italian photographer Marina Rosso shot images for a photo project showing what life as a married couple looks like after nearly six decades together. Her subjects were Licia and Ryan — her own grandparents.
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Since June 19th of last year, political activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Although Ecuador has granted him political asylum, if he steps foot outside the embassy, he could be arrested, extradited to the United States, and tried for his role in leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables.
For most photographers, shooting a portrait of Assange while he’s in hiding isn’t the easiest thing to do. However, art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik recently came up with a clever way of doing so: they sent him an Internet-connected camera that’s baked into a cardboard parcel.
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Instagram is playing a bigger and bigger part in helping the public see and understand important events. At the GigaOM RoadMap conference held this past Monday, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared his vision of how Instagram needs to become a “big data company”. TechCrunch writes,
Systrom says Instagram’s focus is on “making meaning of all the data coming in, and improving the experience of curating.” For example, he said that there were only 85,000 #SuperBowl Instagrams, compared to the 800,000 #SandyGram. People can’t consume 800,000 photos, but they still want to pull valuable information from them.
He gave an example of how Instagram might one day be able to help “if you’re in New York and want to know what gas stations have gas.” That means both photo recognition, but also natural-language processing. Systrom also hinted at “photo location trends” that show where the most Instagrams are currently being taken.
The element of real-time photo sharing will allow Instagram to do things with photos that most photo-sharing services can’t. It’ll be interesting to see what “big data techniques” the company comes up with for making sense of its massive stream of live imagery.
800K #Sandy-grams Showed Systrom Instagram Is “Going To Need To Be A Big Data Company” [TechCrunch]
P.S. The service also saw 2.1x its normal level of traffic during the election this past Tuesday.
Image credit: Insanity at gas station. So glad I’m a cyclist!!! by Kristine Paulus
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter Renzo Gracie was walking on the sidewalk at 22nd street and 10th avenue in Manhattan last night, when he noticed two shady-looking fellows following him. Suspecting that they were planning to mug him, Gracie began sending live tweets and photos to his 100,000+ followers on Twitter. Once the two men finally approached him, asking for a cigarette, he decided to launch a preemptive strike by beating the crap out of the would-be assailants… while live-blogging the whole thing.
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Instagram is a photo sharing service based around instant photo sharing and viewing, so why not take advantage of its real-time nature for gauging the “pulse” of a city?
This is Now is an awesome new website that shows you a live view of the world through the eyes of Instagram users.
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Reminiscent of the Fatescapes series we featured recently, LIVE ! is an ongoing project by Hatim el Hihi and Jean-Marie Delbes in which they post classic album covers that have had deceased band members carefully Photoshopped out of them.
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