Australian photographer Liam McHenry tells the inspiring story of an encounter he had with a confrontational teenager when doing street photography. What started out as a situation spiraling out of control instantly changed when his subject suddenly “understood” his photography. McHenry says that the big revelation he had through the experience was: “it’s never just a photo.”
After Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, the company replaced its homepage with a well-known photo of the brilliant innovator made in 2006 by photographer Albert Watson. An article published by PDN Pulse today reveals the story behind the (perhaps soon to be iconic) photo:
Jobs didn’t look immediately at Watson, but looked instead at the set-up and then focused on Watson’s 4×5 camera “like it was something dinosauric,” Watson recalls, “and he said, ‘Wow, you’re shooting film.”
“I said, ‘I don’t feel like digital is quite here yet.’ And he said, ‘I agree,’ then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘But we’ll get there.’”
Jobs gave Watson about an hour–much longer than he ever gave most photographers for a portrait session. [...] I said, ‘Think about the next project you have on the table,’ and I asked him also to think about instances where people have challenged him.
“If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart,” Watson says, adding, “I heard later that it was his favorite photograph of all time.”
As with many other things, he was right about digital photography — he went on to turn the iPhone into one of the world’s most used cameras.
Steve Jobs: Visionary, Inventor, and Very Challenging Photo Subject [PDN Pulse]
Update: The photo was actually made in 2006 (we had said 2008). Sorry for the error.
P.S. Did you know that Jobs was also instrumental in the rise of Adobe?
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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Earlier this year we saw the launch of two search engines — Stolen Camera Finder and GadgetTrak Serial Search — that help find stolen cameras by searching photos on the web for the serial numbers. The idea is neat, but no one knew whether it would actually help recover stolen gear or not. Turns out it does work.
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Earlier this week the New York Times was lent a mysterious photo album that contained 214 photos of Nazi Germany, including images taken just feet away from Hitler. There was no indication of who the photographer was, so the Lens blog decided to publish some of the photos and crowdsource the task of solving the mystery.
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The power of the Internet is amazing. Just yesterday we reported on how a man found a battered memory card that apparently spent four years in the ocean and recovered 104 photos from it. After the story went viral and was widely reported, the owner of the camera has now been found. The girl nearest the camera in the photo above was visiting relatives four years ago when she accidentally dropped the camera into the Pacific Ocean from a wharf Santa Cruz.
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We’ve heard of digital photos being recovered after lost cameras drift for 1,000 miles (in underwater casing) or spend a year at the bottom of the ocean floor, but is there any hope for a camera that experiences four years of abuse at sea? Turns out there is. A man named Peter Govaars was walking along a beach in California when he stumbled upon a battered camera “skeleton” with a memory card still attached. He took the SD card home, took it apart, spent 30 minutes cleaning it, and was surprised to discover 104 photographs taken within a 2 week period in June 2007.
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Photographer Nasim Mansurov’s friend recently ordered Canon 5D Mark II from online camera store AjRichard for just $2,350, but was then called by a sales rep and told that the battery and charger weren’t included. The final order came out to $2,629, which included some unneeded accessories and 3-day shipping. When the order finally arrived in 2 weeks, he found that it was a 5D Mark II + 24-120mm kit box with the lens removed.
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Here’s a story that was shared over on the Photo.net forums recently:
Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn’t 1,000 bucks for that a robbery?
Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of “robbery”.
When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph.
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Videographer Michael Justin Porco walked around Central Park in NYC a few days ago snapping photographs, after starting to shoot photos for a time-lapse of Bethesda Fountain, it began drizzling and he only shot ten frames (one every 5 seconds using an intervalometer). When he reviewed the frames, he was amazed to discover that he had accidentally captured a sequence of photographs showing a man proposing to his girlfriend.
And that’s when I saw it. Directly in the middle of the frame, as if I had planned it: a man proposing to his girlfriend. 50 seconds. 10 pictures. A fleeting moment now relive-able.
I don’t know who this couple is or where they’re from. I don’t know if they’re New Yorkers or here on vacation. Finding them will be near impossible. But in this social world of Facebook and Twitter, I’m hoping we can track them down. This is something they should have.
Earlier this year a roll of film lost in NYC was returned to its owners after the story went viral on the Internet… and the owners lived in Paris! Porco is attempting to do the same thing with these photos, so if you know anyone who got engaged in Central Park on Saturday May 7th at around 12:41 pm, contact him!
