Aging isn't a topic our youth-obsessed culture takes to very well. Using everything from makeup to digital manipulation in Photoshop, many try to hold the signs of aging at bay for as long as possible.
In 2008, Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas leaving massive flooding and what turned out to be about $19.3 billion in damage. In Houston, the task of documenting the aftermath for the Houston Press fell to photographer Daniel Kramer.
And earlier this month, on the hurricane's 5-year anniversary, Kramer set out again to revisit the once-devastated locations he photographed in 2008 and put together a series of before-and-after shots to show how well the city has bounced back.
NYC Grid is a website run by Paul Sahner that explores and documents New York neighborhoods, "street by street and block by block." One of the awesome reoccurring features on the blog is the before-and-after section, which features pairs of photos showing identical locations but shot decades -- or sometimes over a century -- apart.
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.
Do you always laugh and squirm when you look back at official school pictures from "awkward years"? You're not alone -- take a peek at the Awkward Years Project and you'll see what we mean. The project was started by a Utah-based graphic designer and photography enthusiast named Merilee, who's collecting then-and-now portraits to show people who have blossomed since their awkward teen days.
After Moore, Oklahoma was struck by a deadly tornado earlier this week, photographs quickly emerged showing what the storm looked like from space and what the destruction was like on the ground.
Now, Google's Crisis Center website has published satellite photographs showing what the city look like before and after the tornado. As you can see from the "after" photo above, the tornado -- which measured 1.3-miles wide at one point -- left a trail of devastation that looks like a scar on the face of the Earth.
Earlier this week, Sony announced its new Xperia ZR waterproof smartphone that can double as an everyday underwater camera. After we reported on the story, we were contacted by reader Jeffery Richt, who shot the marketing photographs for Sony. The video above is a behind-the-scenes video showing how the underwater shoot went down.
Located in the city of Toronto, ALPHA Alternative School is one of Canada's oldest free schools. For the school's 40th anniversary last year, photographer Michael Barker worked on a project titled Alpha Alternative School 1972/2012. It's a series of diptychs with portraits of students shot back in the 1970s/1980s placed next to new portraits of the students captured around four decades later.
For her project titled "Identities," London-based photographer Ana Oliveira created a series of before and after photos that show the effects of time and aging.
"Half" is a series of studio portraits by London-based photographer Roman Sakovich that explores the devastating effects of drug abuse. The project was created while Sakovich was studying photgoraphy at the Arts University College at Bournemouth in England.
Philadelphia-based architect and photo enthusiast Andrew Evans has an interesting series of photographs titled Demolition Composites, which contains photographs of ghostly buildings spotted around the City of Brotherly Love. The technique used to create them is extremely basic. Evans took photographs of the buildings, and then rephotographed the same location after the building had been demolished (cleared away for new construction projects).
By compositing the before and after photographs together, Evans ended up with images that offer a final, fading look at the beautiful buildings that once occupied the new construction sites.
Two years ago, San Francisco-based photographer Shawn Clover began to create an amazing series of images, titled 1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend, featuring photographs captured during the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake blended into views of what the city currently looks like.
Wanting to see how she and her siblings have changed over the years, Helsinki-based photographer Wilma Hurskainen decided to gather her three sisters together and recreate photographs of the four of them taken by their father decades ago.
Being Brave is a series of portraits by photographer Andy Brown showing children before and after tooth extraction surgery. Brown first photographed each child bright-eyed and smiling in the waiting room, and then captured their faces again as they were waking up from general anesthesia.
Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.
2008 marked the first time in history that more of Earth's population lived in cities rather than in the countryside, and by 2050 nearly 70% of the world's population will reside in large cities. A new series of satellite photographs captured decades apart by NASA's Landsat department and the U.S. Geological Survey offers a striking look at how human cities have spread across the face of the Earth in just a few short years. The image above shows Las Vegas in 1984 and in 2011.
Here's a clip from the bodybuilding documentary "Bigger Faster Stronger” in which photographer Rich Schaff spills the beans on some industry secrets for how those unbelievable before-and-after photos promoting bodybuilding products are made. He shows how both shots can be of the same model on the same day, with various tricks and image manipulations used to achieve the drastic differences you see.
For his project titled 141 Boxers, photographer Nicolai Howalt shot portraits of boxers before and after boxing matches. The images side-by-side tell the stories of what happened in between when they were captured.
Last week we shared a sneak peek at some jaw-dropping image deblurring technology currently in development at Adobe. The video wasn't the best quality and was captured from the audience, so we didn't get to see the example images very clearly. Adobe has now released an official video of the demo, giving us a better glimpse at what the feature can do.
Here’s a Picasa gallery showing Google satellite imagery of various locations in Japan …
This entry will describe my thought process when editing a portrait, though it could apply to general photos too. Here’s …
Here’s a photograph I took today while hiking with friends on the Bailey Cove Trailhead in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest: …