grandtheftauto

A gallery that claims to "champion photography" has been widely criticized after it shared a series of AI images to its Instagram account this weekend.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk famously said recently that he believes there's a "one in billions" chance that we're not all living in a computer simulation. This idea of real being indistinguishable from digital is the basis for photographer Ollie Ma's project Open World.

Sometimes I make brief escapes from the humdrum of city life and venture into the woods to capture the majesty of nature. I ride around on my bicycle like a madman looking for interesting subjects to capture. The last time I did this, my beloved camera bounced out of my pocket somewhere along the bumpy road; I’d gotten some good shots that day, quite a few actually, and keeping a stoic attitude while backtracking in search of my lost camera became increasingly difficult. Not only was the camera lost, I was lost.

Photography is a hobby that generally takes plenty of hands-on experience to nail down. Sure, the basics of photography, such as composition and the exposure triangle can be learned through reading and research, but to truly improve on your photography, you need to get out in the field and just shoot... or do you?

Photojournalism jobs may be disappearing in real life, but they're thriving in at least one corner of the Interwebs. A handful of participants in the online version of "Grand Theft Auto" have decided it's more fun to document virtual felonies than commit them and have formed a team of street photographers.

A few weeks ago, I found myself wandering around a local career fair -- the type of event I normally find pretty loathsome, or at least overcrowded an unhelpful. This time though, a fun surprise: representatives from Snapchat and Shutterfly stood at booths right next to each other.

Oh boy! I couldn't turn down the chance to chat with some folks more or less connected to the photo industry.

Photography student and street photographer Fernando Pereira Gomes is used to practicing his craft on the streets of New York, but recently, he's taken to shooting photos on the virtual streets of Los Santos, San Andreas, the fictional city of Grand Theft Auto V.

As graphics continue to improve and virtual worlds become more detailed, it makes sense that some people are branching out to photograph (or at least capture via screenshot) these video game worlds. Case in point: the above time-lapse was created from photos, not of any state you'll ever step a physical foot in, but of the fictional Grand Theft Auto V state of San Andreas.