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.
We received a new press release out of the Nikon camp this morning, and although it didn't announce any fresh cameras or lenses, it was eager to share a different creation with us: My Nikon World. My Nikon World is a brand new Facebook app that seeks to "Challenge photographers to shoot, share and learn," mostly through friendly competition.
One of the most entertaining events that photographers get to enjoy each year is the annual Gulf Photo Plus shootout, in which 3 photographers each get 20 minutes to take a photo from concept to completion. In 2012, the shootout pinned David Hobby, Martin Prihoda, and Greg Heisler against each other. This year, John Keatley, Lindsay Adler and Zack Arias are the victims participants, and one of last year's contestants is actually the subject.
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.
Give James Bond, Jack Bauer or Chuck Norris a spork, and they'll figure out a way to overpower bad guys wielding guns. What happens when you give a seasoned photographer a cheap digital camera designed for toddlers?
That's what Kai Wong and DigitalRev did recently. They flew in David Hobby of Strobist and gave him a 2-megapixel Buzz Lightyear camera and three cheapo flash units. Hobby was then tasked with shooting 5 challenges in 5 locations of 5 subjects, using his resourcefulness to make the best images he could with the uber-low-end gear.
Had an interesting conversation the other evening with the delightful Raina Kirn, the “Raina” half of the famed Raina + Wilson photo team (Wilson – worry not, you’re delightful too). The occasion was a west-end Toronto photographer’s pub night, and we were bemoaning the loathsomeness of sorting and organizing images digitally, the endless toil and drudgery of file management, the indentured servitude photographers must now endure as pawns in the palm of the evil god that is Computer. We glumly agreed that there’s really no way to avoid it. You just have to grit your teeth and slog away, like wading through mud — completely unpleasant, but necessary if you want to escape.
What would you do if you were given the task of creating a self-portrait within 20 minutes in front …
If you were given the seemingly impossible task of photographing a giant 300-foot-tall Redwood tree, how would you go about doing so? National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols chose to use raise up a special rig of three Canon 1Ds Mark II DSLR cameras into the air, photographing dozens of photographs that he stitched into a beautiful panoramic tree photo. The photograph was used as the cover photo of the October 2009 edition of the National Geographic.