Countless photographs are snapped every day by people looking to preserve their life's experiences, but is the incessant picture taking actually robbing us of them? Travel photographer and writer Erin Sullivan recently gave this interesting 8-minute TED Talk on the subject.
The first-ever picture of a black hole was unveiled yesterday, generating a huge amount of interest and excitement across the world. But how exactly was this picture captured? Well, it definitely wasn't as simple as "pointing and clicking" a giant camera.
George Steinmetz, a photographer who we featured previously, recently gave an inspiring 10-minute TED talk about his work. To capture unique images of Africa, Steinmetz took a motorized paraglider to the skies.
Here's an inspiring 14-minute TEDx Talk by photographer Billy Weeks about documentary photography. Weeks explores that specific moment in which a photographer and subject "intersect with a single point of view."
Creativity in any discipline is about finding new and original ideas. When they strike, creative thoughts seem to appear out of nowhere -- light bulb moments. Sometimes it seems like creativity is something intangible that we can’t control. But are there ways you can nurture your own creativity? How can we better create the conditions for those moments of inspiration to strike?
Humans, by nature, avoid risk, stress, and anything else that sounds uncomfortable. But world-class adventure photographer Corey Rich would encourage you to stop. In this presentation, he explains embracing discomfort has brought him his greatest rewards in life.
Photographer Stephen Wilkes is known for his ambitious photo compositions that show scenes changing from day to night. Back in February 2016, Wilkes gave a talk at TED2016 about how he captures the passing of time in a single photo.
If you need a dose of inspiration and wonder, check out this 10-minute video by TED about the life and work of ocean conservation photographer Thomas Peschak.
Photographer Vincent Laforet dazzled the world’s eyes this past year with his project …
Street photographer Babycakes Romero scored a viral hit last year with his project "The Death of Conversation," a series of photos showing people "together" but lost in the worlds of their own smartphones.
Romero was recently invited to TEDxBergamo in Italy to talk about the project and his thoughts on the images. You can watch the 16-minute presentation above.
Photographer Jimmy Nelson has spent years traveling the globe in a quest to …
Chris Burkard is a California-based surf photographer who has shot for some of the biggest companies and publications in the world. After years of shooting on popular, sun-soaked beaches and making a living through his "dream job," Burkard began to yearn for beaches that weren't dominated by tourists and the comforts of civilization. So, he began traveling to remote -- and often frigid -- shores around the world for surf photos that are off the beaten path.
Here's a fantastic 6-minute TED Talk by photographer Anand Varma, who recently became involved in the preservation of bees after being asked by National Geographic to shoot a story on them.
As part of the work, Varma shot a fascinating time-lapse that shows the first 21 days of a bee's life in just 60 seconds. Seen between 2 and 3 minutes in the video above, the video offers a closeup look at how bees grow from tiny larvae into mature honeybees inside their brood cells.
Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey recently gave this inspiring 18-minute talk at TEDxVerona …
Back in June, we reported that a company called Planet Labs is working to improve the efficiency of satellite photography by using a large number of tiny satellites instead of a single satellite.
Company co-founder and CEO Will Marshal recently gave a TED Talk (shown above) that sheds some light on what the company is doing.
Well known headshot photographer Peter Hurley has teamed up with respected psychologist Anna Rowley to develop a way for people to overcome their fear of being in front of a camera.
The pair call this research and application Psyphotology, a clever wordplay on psychology and photography. Their hope is to impact the world by helping us gain self-acceptance rather than focusing on criticism.
National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore has been capturing life across the globe for over 22 years. And it was these travels across our Blue Marble that lead him to take on a personal project that he hopes will bring awareness to a subject he’s held dear since he was a child.
Called Photo Ark, Sartore has teamed up with zoos and rescue facilities across the globe to document the last of some of the most endangered animals on our planet, and in the TEDx talk above, he tells you all about this moving endeavor.
What is 'freedom'? This seems to be one of the main questions at the center of photojournalist Kitra Cahana's recent TED Talk in which she tells the stories of the nomadic, homeless youth she spent many months documenting.
The intersection of Science, Technology and Art, at least according to renowned filmmaker and time-lapse photographer Louie Schwartzberg, is curiosity and wonder. And in the TED talk above, he makes the case for how few things pique that curiosity and inspire that wonder like the "hidden miracles of the natural world" that time-lapse, slow motion and microscopic imagery reveal.
Have you ever taken a photograph, just to look at it and be disappointed that you can only enjoy it with your eyes? Well, to your rescue is an incredible, fictional application called PicSong -- courtesy of The Onion.
There's a belief that being successful as a photographer these days runs the possibility gamut from difficult to almost impossible, but examples like Wyn Wiley seem to run contrary to that belief. Wiley is a very successful 21-year-old photographer, and in the Lincoln Nebraska TEDxYouth talk above, he blows minds by sharing his incredibly optimistic and inspirational world view.
Back in March, we shared a time-lapse that showed photographer Liu Bolin -- also known as the "invisible man" -- disappearing into the stage at TED 2013. The time-lapse showed what he goes through for every project: days of preparation followed by hours of standing still while artists paint him "into" the background.
His talk during that conference, however, went into much more detail. He talks about the process of creating some of his best shots, about his start, and about the motivation behind his most impressive work. Fair warning: the talk is given with an interpreter but you'll find you need to activate and lean mostly on the closed captions as the interpreter only gets the occasional word in.
Here's a TEDx talk photographer Brandon Stanton gave at Columbia University last October about "how our worldview is negatively affected by good stories." Stanton is the photographer behind the website Humans of New York.
The photographic story of Sebastião Salgado doesn't begin when he was handed a camera as a child. It, like a few others we've shared, begins much later in life (after a PhD in economics) when photography, as Salgado puts it, "made a total invasion into [his] life."
If you've never heard a basic overview of the history of photography, then this cute little animated video from TED-Ed is here for you. It covers everything from the invention of the camera obscura, to the battle between the calotype and the daguerreotype, to the rise of portable cameras.
Edith Widder is one of the three scientists that managed to capture the first high-resolution video footage of an actual giant squid. And about a month ago, her TED talk describing how she and her team did it (embedded above) was finally posted online.
Almost 2 stories tall, you would think that something that massive would have already been photographed or video taped. But it was Widder's common-sense approach that would yield the groundbreaking footage. So, how did scientists manage to finally catch a giant squid on camera? One word: quietly.
Director Cesar Kuriyama received a good bit of attention on the Internet last year for capturing 1 second of video on each day of his 30th year of life, and then turning the snippets into a beautiful recap of his year. The video premiered during a TED talk Kuriyama gave in March. That talk has just been published by TED, and can be seen above.
Photographer Clyde Butcher shoots big photos, and we mean big. He develops large format black-and-white prints that range in size from your standard 8"x10" all the way up to 5x8... feet! This phenomenal photographer's journey and the type of photography he's become famous for are an inspiration to the people out there who want to see the extent to which the medium can be pushed.
Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld. When asked what he felt like when the project was just starting out, Kusters states,
I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos was a sign of weakness.
As his surname suggests, Kusters is not from Japan (he's from Belgium). It took 10 months of negotiations before he and his brother were given an unprecedented access into the closed world of Japanese organized crime.
Try imagining a make-believe creature that has absolutely no basis in reality. Can you? Not really. The truth is, everything imaginary is simply a rehash of things that actually exist... just in a combination that doesn't exist. Aliens are simply strange combinations of humans and other creatures that we know. Unicorns are horses with horns. Bigfoot is some guy that accidentally spilled Rogaine all over his body.
This is the basis for writer Kirby Ferguson's big idea: that "everything is a remix." He created a popular four part video series on this topic over the past year, and recently he was invited by TED to give the condensed, sub-10-minute version of it that's shown above.
San Francisco-based photographer Lisa Kristine has spent the past 28 years documenting indigenous cultures in 70 countries on 6 continents around the world. More recently, she has been working with the organization Free the Slaves, using her photography to document the monstrosity that is modern day slavery.
The video above is a powerfully moving talk Kristine recently gave at TEDxMaui about the subject and her photography that is meant to make a difference.
Here’s an interesting TED audition by artist Phil Hansen, who speaks on embracing …
This fascinating TED talk was given last month by MIT researcher Ramesh Raskar …
If you're human then you've probably looked at a portrait of yourself at some point and been dissatisfied for one specific reason or another. Most of the time, though, it just comes down to an unexplainable "I don't like it" or "I never look good in pictures" or, in extreme cases, a sound effect similar to gagging. But according to this short TED audition, the problem isn't with your expression or your looks, it's in your head.
Here’s a talk that Lytro founder Ren Ng gave at …
Here’s an interesting TED talk by photographer Rachel Sussman, who undertook an interesting …