When an article critical of excessive photo manipulation (such as replacing the sky or adding fake reflections on water) is posted on photography news websites, it often generates a flood of comments, both in agreement and disagreement.
With the increasing power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence available on both phones and PCs, we have reached a point where it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between photography and composites.
Yes, it's post-processed. I get this question all the time, like every other photographer on the planet, and it often sparks heated debates that challenge the notion of objective reality and the meaning of photography.
Saw an ad for a “Styled (Wedding) Shoots Conference.” For those of you unfamiliar with the styled shoots, it’s where models play fake brides who fake marry models playing fake grooms at a fake wedding filled with fake guests and then cut a wedding cake at a fake styled reception while photographers who have paid to photograph the fake-ness happily snap away at the event and then post all the styled fakery in their portfolio as samples of “their work.”
Here's a 3-minute video that shows the reality behind many picture-perfect Instagram photos. It was created by Ditch the Label, an anti-bullying organization working in the USA, UK, and Mexico.
To the uninitiated, landscape photography might seem like a pretty swell gig. You imagine traveling to incredible vista after incredible vista, reconnecting with nature, and feeling one with your surroundings. But that, as Thomas Heaton painfully illustrates, is rarely the case.
Every photographer should photograph a cancer patient at some point in his/her life. It teaches you how little of a person you are and how you’re but one character in the story of life. That’s what I learned at least when I had the privilege of photographing the double mastectomy of my friend, Diana Sheldon, 38, last fall.
Snapchat just upped the ante on acid trip-like augmented reality. In their latest update, the photo and video messaging app added something called 'World Lenses': basically animated filters that you can apply to the world around you the same way you could apply the app's 'Selfie Lenses' to your face.
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.
Photographer Éric Lafforgue has spent years traveling the world to shoot documentary photos for well-known publications. He was even given rare access to North Korea, where he shot thousands of photos showing citizens and government officials going about their daily lives.
After his 6th trip to the country in September 2012, however, Lafforgue was banned by the government for the photos he was sharing online.
“Regardless of what it signifies, any photographic image also connotes memory and nostalgia, nostalgia for modernity and the twentieth century, the era of the pre-digital, pre-post-modern.” --Lev Manovich
There will always be a need to connect to the past. Contemporary culture actively and unconsciously cycles through past follies and reflects upon progress. It is no surprise then, that we see popular culture re-presenting past generations. Perhaps more so than any other period in our recent past, today’s pop-cultural climate is mimicking that of the 1970s.
Professional free runner Jason Paul recently teamed up with Red Bull to create this wild optical illusion video that you have to see to believe -- or not. The video’s description says that “Life as a free runner means the world is your playground… or is it just one big illusion?” It's a mind-bending visual experience that will have your brain questioning reality.
Purchasing your first DSLR is a big, important moment in your photographic journey, whether or not you ever intend to make photography more than just a hobby. However, the reality of purchasing and owning your first DSLR is often a lot less exciting than what you imagined while you were saving up to buy it.
Mike Fry recently bought a GoPro, and like many before and after him …
In every facet of our lives, we’re bombarded by advertisements: online, while driving, on the radio, everywhere. So much so that they become more noise than anything else. So wouldn't you like to erase some of that noise and replace it with iconic photography? Well, soon you can.
For one month, starting in mid-October, No Ad, an augmented reality application will be overlaying pieces of art from the International Center of Photography over the commercial advertisements seen throughout the New York City subway system.
Last week we got an email from photographer Damian Battinelli that really piqued our interest. He told us that he and five of his friends had, in a moment of drunken brilliance in a Las Vegas casino, come up with a fantastic idea for a new online reality show that would pit photographer against photographer in a series of fun photo challenges with a twist.
Thus was born Photo Throwdown, a photography show that just aired the very entertaining and exciting 'part one' of its first episode today!
“While there’s life, there’s hope.” That was the original motto of a magazine that for more than 100 years documented …
What happens when "and then they lived happily ever after" is replaced with something more akin to "and then reality reared its ugly head?" That's the question photographer Dina Goldstein asked in her award-winning photo series Fallen Princesses.
On April 8, 2011, Senator Jon Kyl was quoted on the Senate floor as saying, "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."
This is not a post about abortion or Planned Parenthood. This is a discussion about veracity and why it matters in photojournalism. In fact, about 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related. When Sen. Kyl was confronted with the facts, his office responded with “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.”
There's been a lot of controversy around magazines using Photoshop to make real people look unrealistically pretty or fit, but what if you could actively Photoshop what you saw and experienced? That's the question the people over at Cracked decided to ask, and the answers are pretty hilarious:
It's common knowledge that models in magazines are Photoshopped to look the way that they do -- often to the detriment of the young girls that aspire to have these computer generated figures -- but for the most part protests have come in the form of ad campaigns like Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. But in the past couple of weeks, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm decided to take a different approach.
The International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers did a study a couple years …