If you've followed PetaPixel for any significant amount of time, you've seen Martin Schoeller's work. Heck, even if you haven't, chances are good you've picked up a magazine and seen at least one of his striking portraits, all done in the same beautiful and immediately recognizable style.
Is the Ladibird an iPhone case, a fully-functioning camera or a cleverly designed smartphone add-on? The answers, in no particular order, are yes, yes and yes. The upcoming device manages the increasingly difficult feat of pioneering a new and potentially useful category by turning an iPhone into a seriously capable portrait camera.
Well, if you're gonna put a portrait of your mug on Instagram for the whole world to see, this is the way to do it. Taken from outside the ISS during one of the two spacewalks required to replace a faulty water pump, this selfie-like portrait (it is NOT a selfie, contrary to just about every headline you'll read) was uploaded to NASA's Instagram account yesterday.
Last week, a video showing how a hyper-realistic iPad finger-painting of Morgan Freeman (inspired by this portrait by photographer Scott Gries) came together made the viral rounds faster than most. It had already earned its first million hits in the first 12 hours, and currently sits at almost 11.25 million.
A portrait is a powerful thing. Programs like Help Portrait -- which is dedicated to spreading joy, inspiration and hope by taking portraits of people who have never had one taken before -- are easy proof of this. But just in case you find yourself in need of more proof, the If Only for a Second portrait project is here to provide it.
Back in February of 2012, portraitist Peter Hurley shared an awesome tutorial that showed how to accentuate your subject's jawline in portraits and instantly make them look much more photogenic. That video went insanely viral amongst photographers, and now, Hurley has finally released a followup in which he shares what he calls "his most incredible tip for looking photogenic."
Photographer Pelle Cass is fond of composites. The set of so-called 'single frame time-lapses' he put together for his Selected People series has gone quite viral.
But his fondness for composite photography doesn't stop at creating overcrowded scenes, he applied the same approach to taking portraits, creating a bizarre (and perhaps a little unsettling) series of portraits called Strangers in the process.
When you hear that a stop motion video depicts the process of aging, death and reincarnation, your mind probably goes straight to digital manipulation. After all, how else do you make someone look older? Or dead for that matter?
But London-based makeup artist Emma Allen didn't use Photoshop to create her video "Ruby," she used face paint instead.
Art and photography often intersect in interesting and, at times, confusing ways. For instance: if you create a beautiful 11-acre portrait out of wood stakes, soil, sand, grass and stones that is only truly visible from the air, are you an artist, portraitist or just a landscaper with an artistic eye? What's the percentage breakdown?
Obviously there's no right answer here, but Jorge Rodrigeuz-Gerada -- a man who recently did just this -- calls himself an artist and so we'll go with that.
Hey, sometimes you're just in the right place at the right, sexylicious time. That's about the extent of the explanation Notre Dame running back Cam McDaniel gave for a ridiculously attractive viral shot of him from last week's USC game that looks more like an Old Spice ad than a candid sports moment.
Photographs may have become depressingly common in your world, but there are still vast chunks of the globe where images are rare and powerful. A new charity is hoping to fill some of that void by offering portrait sessions and prints in impoverished areas, funded by the sale of prints by noted photographers.
Here's a humorous 14-second video that might make that last bit of your Friday workday go by that much faster. In an attempt to prove how important the right angle is when taking a selfie (or any portrait for that matter) a kind girl decided to demonstrate how drastic a difference she could make by simply moving her face and changing the angle of the photo.
Capturing our likeness has been a pursuit of the human race for thousands of years. From paintings of gods in Egypt and Greece, to portrait paintings of royalty, to the unabashedly narcissistic selfie of today.
In this week's episode of PBS Arts' webseries Off Book the topic of the day is portraiture, a subject each of the four interviewees takes on from their own unique angle.
Check out this portrait of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse by photographer Paul Mobley and digital artist Mike Campau. Can you tell how it was created?
Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.
Albiac calls his "Stardust" project "an experiment in generative portraiture."
Back in May, we featured the volcano photos of photographer Miles Morgan, a guy who gets so hot to lava that he's had his shoes and tripod melt. If you didn't believe that shoe melting fact then, check out the crazy photo above: it shows photographer Kawika Singson with his shoes and tripod in flames due to the intense heat of lava.
When you're tasked with taking a famous person's photo, you often don't have much time with the actual person to go through a trial and error process and figure stuff out. Photographer Philippe Echaroux wanted to take things to the extreme and see if he could photograph a celebrity in less than a minute total.
Today's minor update from Instagram -- you can tell it's minor because it's version 4.0.2 -- was actually a bit more feature-packed than the number suggests. Coming on the heels of the major Instagram Video update in 4.0, the newest iOS update adds much sought-after landscape support as well as video stabilization when using the front-facing camera.
I have sat staring at the computer monitor for the last hour and words refused to appear on the screen. Even in times of stress I can write out a quick blog, but the current situation with Aaron Hernandez has proved tough.
It is important to me to be respectful of the man that was killed and the ongoing investigation, as well as tell about the photoshoot and the side of Aaron that I met on set. With that said, please read this as a story about a shoot and not the lobbying of an opinion over the current investigation.
With the NBA Conference playoffs nearing completion and the Spurs already a lock for the Finals, I got a call from Brad Smith, the Director of Photography at Sports Illustrated, asking if I could quickly get to San Antonio.
Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker rarely if ever pose together, but had reluctantly agreed to pose for an SI cover which would come out a couple of days later, to coincide with the beginning of the finals.
Portraitist Miller Mobley is a successful photographer twice over. As a college student, he built a successful photography business in Tuscaloosa, AL, working for both local and regional clients. Later, he and his wife picked up their entire life and moved to New York City, where the now 24-year-old Mobley has managed to land all of his dream clients one after the other.
My friend Gustaf Drevin and I are the Editor and Creative Director (respectively) of Medicor, the student union magazine of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. Long before we even got involved with the publication, we had dreamed up this ‘fantasy’ issue where we would have a huge cover story featuring Hans Rosling, the founder of Gapminder and one of TIME's 100 most influential people in 2012.
We would have a minimalistic design, and we would have great photos; we even wanted to have a launch party with Bill Gates, but that’s a story for another time. After Gustaf became the editor for Medicor, we finally got the chance to realise our fantasy. This is the story of how we got Hans Rosling on the cover of Medicor.
We can think of a lot of worse things to call a photograph than "gothic," but that label was enough to really tick off the owner of a Kansas photo studio.
Colorful and unusual patterns pictures are what photographer Erno-Erik Raitanen calls self-portraits. The pictures, which Raitanen says are more like photograms, involve no camera, some photographic film, and bacteria.
The series, called Bacteriograms, is a display of Raitanen's own body bacteria cultivated on the gelatin surface of film negatives, much like bacteria is grown in Petri dishes in a laboratory setting.
Platon (short for Platon Antoniu) is a Greek-English portrait photographer who has had the privilege of photographing some of the world's most powerful people. From literal world leaders, to cultural world leaders, to regular people who are changing the world one day at a time, his photography has earned him many well-deserved awards and magazine covers.
Last week, he spoke to the folks at the Wired Business Conference about his work, and Wired was kind enough to share the video online.
The woman in this portrait doesn't actually exist. The face is actually the average of 57 different women -- 57 girlfriends that appeared in episodes of the popular TV sitcom Seinfeld.
If you had to select one photograph to best represent the entire human race, which photograph would you choose? That's a question encyclopedia editors must answer, and one that the Wikipedia community had to as well. The photograph above is what they have settled on (as of May 2013) for their article on "Human".
It's a portrait of a couple from northern Thailand's Akha people group, indigenous hill tribe. The husband is carrying the stem of a banana-plant that will be fed to their family's pigs.
Want to see how much of an effect the direction and color of your lighting has on your portrait subject's face? Check out this trippy video by Nacho Guzman, who used a moving light and changing colors to cause a woman's face to look like it's constantly morphing.
French photographer Philippe Echaroux is known, among other things, as a great portrait photographer. You might remember his work taking studio quality "celebrity" portraits of random strangers on the street.
For his most recent portraiture project, however, he eschewed even the limited studio gear he brought out on the street with him, and issued himself a challenge: take a high-quality, professional portrait, using nothing more than an iPhone and a €10 lighting budget.
Up. That’s all you need to say. Last November, we took on a project with Wired UK magazine to photograph Richard Branson’s latest venture in attempting to conquer the final frontier: space. We spent the good part of a week in the deserts of New Mexico and California, photographing the spaces and places, the infrastructure, the people, and ultimately Sir Richard himself.
Here's an interesting photo project idea by Matthew, who tells us that the top photo shows him being held by his father when he was 7 months old, and the bottom photo shows him holding his own 7-month-old son.
The painting above is the first official portrait of Kate Duchess of Cambridge (formerly known as Kate Middleton). When it was unveiled to the public earlier this month, art critics around the world bashed it for making Kate look ghostly and much older than she actually is. On the receiving end of all the criticism has been British artist Paul Emsley, the man who photographed Kate Middleton and then turned one of the photos into the painting seen above.
A good number of websites are talking about the new official portrait of President Obama. It was shot in the Oval Office back on December 6th, 2012 by official White House photographer Pete Souza, whom we've written about quite a few times in the past.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a photograph of you holding yourself up. I hope it will give you a good idea of how I create this type of image so that you can create a similar image yourself! Obviously, this is not the only way to create this type of image, but it is the way I have found most believable, as the connection between the two subjects actually occurs in real life. Enjoy!
What defines a portrait? Is it still a portrait if the subject is present in the frame but hidden from the eye? If the answer is yes, then photographer Chris Buck has captured a series of unique celebrity portraits through his project titled Presence. If not, then each of the photographs simply shows a random scene.
The photograph above? That's a portrait of famous American photographer Cindy Sherman.
New York Times staff photographer Fred R. Conrad was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of acclaimed color photography pioneer Joel Meyerowitz. Freelance videographer Elaisha Stokes went along to shadow Conrad, and captured this interesting behind-the-scenes video in which Conrad shares some thoughts on the experience of pointing a lens at a master of pointing lenses.
It has been a long time since I have asked for something photo related for my birthday. I usually don’t ask, just because I’m very particular about what equipment I use, and my friends and family know it. But this year, it was different. I thought about dabbling in some old school photography, so I asked for a Polaroid 600 camera. My fiancée stepped up to the plate and delivered, gifting me an awesome 1983 Polaroid Sun 600 LMS. I had some fun with my first pack of film, but then it was time to start pushing the envelope.
An idea hit me one day, and I knew I had to try something that I’ve never seen done before: shooting off camera flash with an older Polaroid 600 instant camera.
Slovenia-based professional photographer Borut Peterlin was recently tasked with shooting a portrait of painter/illustrator/author Milan Erič for influential Slovenian magazine Mladina. Peterlin decided that he wanted to create a wet plate collodion photo, but spent weeks worrying about whether he would be able to accomplish it given the tight schedule of the on-location shoot.
In 1984, photographer Steve McCurry shot a portrait titled "Afghan Girl" that would become the defining image of his career and one of the most famous National Geographic covers ever published. In 2002, McCurry was able to locate the subject, Sharbat Gula, and learn her story.
Documentary filmmaker and photography enthusiast Matt Morris recently noticed a magazine article about a tintype photographer named Harry Taylor based in his hometown of Wilmington, NC. Having recently gotten engaged, Morris and his fiancée decided to have Taylor shoot their engagement photos using the 150-year-old photo process. They ended up sitting for a 5-hour-portrait session, and Morris was stunned by the results.
A few months later, he decided to return to Taylors studio with two Canon 5Ds in tow and spent an afternoon documenting Harry's work. The fantastic 4-minute documentary above is what resulted.