Culture

Photographer Michael Wolf began his career as a photojournalist in Hong Kong working for a German magazine. In the early 2000s, he turned to non-editorial photography with an unusual project called Bastard Chairs. Wolf had noticed that all over China, there were makeshift chairs that had been put together using whatever materials the owners could get their hands on. He began documenting these strange pieces of furniture, showing the creative ideas people in China had for sitting down.

Digital and mobile phone photography have made it easy for parents to document every waking (and non-waking) moment of a child's life, but what effect is this constant picture-taking having on kids? David Zweig has written up an article over at the New York Times arguing that our culture of photography is intruding on the preciousness of youth, and that parents should take fewer photographs of their children.

You don't get to 200,000 followers without earning a few perks. A couple of months ago, we reported that a number of Instagram power users had been flown out to the US Open in New York as part of various companies' marketing campaigns. Free trips and freebies like that one are becoming more and more common for Instagrammers with large followings.

Photographer Michel “Mijonju” Jones just sent us this humorous parody music video that …

Mobile apps with retro filters such as Instagram and Hisptamatic have been very polarizing in the photo industry, but the latest member of the anti-Instagram camp has many people scratching their heads. The NCAA has banned college coaches from using Instagram filters while recruiting prospective athletes.

If you suffer from gear envy, you might want to skip over this post. Apparently children from wealthy Chinese families these days are traveling with fancy DSLR cameras while on vacation. A person named Liu Li Yang recently published a series of photos over on Chinese social networking service Renren that show a group of tourist children clutching expensive Canon and Nikon DSLRs and lenses.

Starting in 2004, British photographer Julian Germain began a photo project shooting portraits of classrooms in North East England. The next year, he began doing the same thing for schools across the UK. It soon turned into an international project, as he began traveling to schools across the globe to document the environments young people are learning in. He calls the series Classroom Portraits. The photograph above shows a 4th grade math class in Cusco, Peru.

Wealthy people who want to flaunt their wealth are attracted to shiny and pricey things. It’s no surprise then, …

Everyone is a photographer these days, and it is estimated that 380 billion photographs were taken last year, with …

Redditor bottleface was watching the live stream of Jay-Z's first annual "Budweiser Made in America" festival this past weekend, when something caught his eye. One of the concert goers standing in the front rows had made a pretty unique camera choice: a Macbook Air. While the fans around him held up smartphones to snap photos and record videos, the Macbookographer was proudly holding up his laptop with the FaceTime camera pointed at the performance.

Manchester-based couple Lisa and Alex are on a mission to find the best place in the world to get married, and through first hand experience rather than other people's opinions. They're currently in the midst of a two-year journey around the world in a 24-year-old camper van, hunting for both the perfect location and the best cultural wedding ceremonies.

They stage a mock wedding in each country they visit -- in the style of a culture associated with that location -- and recruit a wedding photographer to help them document that experience.

It's standard procedure for photo labs around the world to contact authorities if illegal activity is discovered in pictures, but what constitutes "illegal activity" can different widely from place to place. Case in point: three French tourists were recently given jail terms in Sri Lanka for photographs they took containing Buddha statues.

The New York Times has published a great interview with Michael H. Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association and the editor of the organization's advocacy blog. In it, NYT Lens Blog co-editor James Estrin asks Osterreicher about photographers' rights and the trend of people being stopped while shooting public locations.

Forget rings on your fingers or grills on your teeth: Japanese designer Jay Tsujimura thinks your camera is where bling should go. Presumably geared towards people who use pricey cameras as a fashion accessory and status symbol, Tsujimura's premium line of camera jewelry is designed to adorn hotshoes and shutter releases.

Would you shoot a wedding professionally with your iPhone and Hipstamatic? If you want to stay in business, probably not. But what if you were asked to do so, and paid for your work?

If you live near West Hartford, Connecticut, this might be an actual gig you can do. There's a couple there looking for one or two Hipstamatic photographers to document their wedding in mid-September (don't worry, they also have a primary non-iPhone photographer).

Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he's been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer's Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent misunderstanding over Mann's technology allegedly caused a confrontation between Mann and several employees at a Paris McDonald's restaurant.

Here's a top ten list, in no particular order, of Nikon movie roles! Often appearing as uncredited extras, these Nikon SLRs have been present at some of the greatest moments in movie history.

Smartphone cameras have gotten to the point of being able to stack up well against digital cameras — at …

In both still photography and video, camera work should generally be invisible to viewers, allowing them to focus on …

Here’s a funny short clip from the HBO TV show Veep in which …

To celebrate the end of the school year, the photojournalism students at Western Kentucky University created this music video …

Although everyone has an opinion on Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1b, I think we can all agree: Instagram is terrible for photographers (Gotcha). Why? Let’s count the ways.

People ask me, “Jun Shen, how do you shoot so fast on the streets?!?” I’m like a ninja, whipping out my camera, shooting it, and putting it away so quickly that my subjects don’t know what hit them. They walk away whispering to themselves, “What was that? Did he take our photo?

It’s thanks to video games, folks. Read on to find out why.

Allen Fuqua loves traveling and watching movies. To combine those two loves, he visits locations around the world were scenes in various films were shot, and reshoots them for what he calls "movie mimicking". How many of these movies do you recognize?

With the recent camera releases (or maybe Spring fever) I’ve been rather amazed watching various photography forums have major melt downs during the last few weeks. I said something about cameras and lenses just being tools, not life and death, and got immediately annihilated. They aren’t just tools, I was told, they are the means to make a living for some people, and the passionate hobby of others. That got me thinking, though: I have friends who make their living as carpenters, and others for whom woodworking is a passionate hobby. I got to thinking how silly their forums would seem if they acted like we do.

Choices is a Warhol-esque (or Gursky-esque) project by photographer Richard Stultz, who visited various stores to document the mind-numbingly large number of choices consumers are faced while shopping.

While a number of countries are taking steps to ban the unrealistic Photoshopping of models, Israel has …

The Pink & Blue Project by South Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon started seven years ago after she photographed a portrait of her 5-year-old daughter sitting next to her beloved pink possessions. She then began creating portraits of other girls who loved pink things, and then other boys who loved blue.

Toys are getting fancier and cameras are getting weirder. Mattel is set to launch a new camera barbie called …

Now here’s an absolutely bizarre statistic if it’s actually true: 76 percent of Facebook photos with tagged Britons show …