Sure, Instagram has provided some folks with a ready-made market for selling illegal items or doing unsavory things, but the photo sharing services has also expanded the boundaries of how incompetent a crook can be.
Instagram has recently been forced to add a number of drug-related terms to its growing list of a banned hashtags in an effort to cut down on illegal drug sales via the photo sharing site.
Top editors at the Associated Press slammed the White House -- or, more specifically, the Obama Administration -- last week for restricting photographers' access to the president in favor of staged "propaganda."
If you've been following news about the Sochi Olympics today, you probably stumbled across one of the many reports that journalists would be banned from using non-professional gear and, in fact, stripped of accreditation on the spot if they broke the rules and pulled out their smartphones to take pictures. Thankfully, however, those reports seem to be false.
Want to get more likes on Instagram? Make sure your images are predominantly blue, spaciously cropped, bright and mildly desaturated.
In the history of mankind, the Olympic torch has made its way up to space a total of two times: once in 1996 and another time in 2000. Now we can add another year to that list: 2013 -- only this one is even more special, because for the first time in history, the Olympic torch actually went out on its very own spacewalk.
No matter how good your intentions, any tool can be perverted and used for a negative purpose that was never intended. That is the case with Instagram right now, as reports are coming out of Philly that an anonymous account has been 'ratting out' witnesses of violent crimes by posting photos, police statements and testimonies.
Veterans Day is right around the corner, so it's nice to see that one of the time-lapses making the most impact online over the past couple of days is one showing a homeless US Army veteran being given a makeover and, in some ways, a new lease on life.
Photographer Nolan Conway has a gift for finding and photographing people that you or I might never think twice about pointing a camera at. His series of the unique people he ran into at McDonald's took him to 50 McDonald’s in 22 states, and garnered quite a bit of press attention.
While his newest series isn't taking him all over the country, it again captures a subculture that doesn't really get any attention: people who call Walmart parking lots home.
If you need a laugh this Thursday, look no further: the Student Union of Nottingham Trent University in England has you covered with a viral video they released a couple of days ago. It's a classic that never seems to get old: a montage of people smiling or posing awkwardly for what they think is a photo, when in fact it's video the Student Union was shooting.
This post is prompted by, but not exactly about, the Humans of New York project/phenomenon (Side Note: This is not an anti-HONY rant. If anything, HONY is merely the straw which broke the camel’s back).
I’ve been aware of HONY for a while as it’s been gathering steam and it’s never interested me. I’ve skimmed it a few times but each time I do, I have a gut-level reaction to it as "just another white guy photographing New York."
The above video, titled "How not to be a photographer at a gig," has gotten a ton of attention over the past few days as it has made the rounds online. It shows concert photographer Aelle Lucà at a small gig really going at it with the flash and bothering (at the very least) the person who recorded and posted the video.
As you might imagine, the comments section for this video on YouTube quickly turned into a troll-fest of insults and negativity directed at Lucà. But as it turns out, this is exactly what the band wanted and asked for... and his photos turned out pretty darn well.
For as long as most of us can remember, the pre-takeoff safety briefing given in airplanes worldwide always included something to the effect of "all electronics must be turned off and stowed during takeoff and landing." For photographers, that meant lost photo opportunities unless you were willing to break the rules to get a great shot.
If you're looking to make an argument for the inherent superiority of Western-style capitalism, consider how difficult it apparently is to find a competent Photoshop jockey in the Communist world.
The latest example comes from the Eastern provinces of China, where what was supposed to be a heartwarming record of regional officials honoring the elderly turned into an internationally recognized example of how not to doctor a photograph.
I grew up without the Internet.
When I was young and starting out in the business, I had no Internet, although I did have a computer. It was an Apple IIe. I felt very fancy with it, kind of like Matthew Broderick in "War Games." To me, it was like a big expensive calculator because I only used it to run reports and for record keeping. When it came to photography and the running of a business, I had to obtain information from classes and teachers, and by doing research via those archaic inventions called "books" -- you might have heard of them.
Hey, sometimes you're just in the right place at the right, sexylicious time. That's about the extent of the explanation Notre Dame running back Cam McDaniel gave for a ridiculously attractive viral shot of him from last week's USC game that looks more like an Old Spice ad than a candid sports moment.
It’s not uncommon to hear someone say that they were haunted by an image, often an old photograph. It is a figurative and evocative expression. To say that an image is haunting is to say that the image has lodged itself in the mind like a ghost might stubbornly take up residence in a house, or that it has somehow gotten a hold of the imagination and in the imagination lives on as a spectral after-image.
One of the joys of photography is the interesting cast of characters you meet along the way. I'm not talking about the subject's you're shooting here, I'm talking about the other photographers you'll run in to.
No matter how many different personalities you come across though, you'll eventually start to notice recurring themes. A cast of familiar characters if you will. Today, in order to lighten things up a little, we'll explore a few of those different characters. Here are 8 different types of photographers you'll run into in your life:
Camille Lepage, 25, is an independent French photographer living in South Sudan. She works on long term projects about topics that do not make to the mainstream media and looks at the consequences of the politics on the populations.
For over a year now, documentary photographer Camille Lepage has been photographing the struggles of South Sudan. As a new country, sovereign since 2011, South Sudan can be considered a hotbed for social, political, and religious conflicts. These conflicts are laid bare by Lepage through a strong, intuitive eye and a determination to get her shot.
Her two on-going bodies of work, You Will Forget Me and Vanishing Youth (which are on display below) contain stirring imagery that speak of the violence, and the religious and cultural dissonance that permeates this young country and its people.
Update on 12/16/21: This video embed has been removed by its owner. You can still watch it here.
It might be hard to believe in retrospect, but it turns out that Steve McCurry's most famous photograph, the iconic 'Afghan Girl,' was almost passed over for the cover of National Geographic in 1985.
Narcissism and obsessive personal documentation are all fine and good, but sometimes you just want to buy and sell stuff. A new site promises to make that considerably easier to do just that through Instagram by restricting searches to postings with a #forsale hashtag and providing a simplified transaction system.
Next time a spouse or friend razzes you for spending too much on camera gear, try pointing out all the cool, expensive stuff you didn't buy. Like the antique, no-name, large-format lens currently up for sale on eBay for close to half a million bucks.
Every two years, the lighting of the Olympic Flame amidst the ruins of the Temple of Hera is a pretty interesting performance. The torch is lit from the light of the Sun, using a parabolic mirror to focus the Sun's rays on the fuel in the torch and set it ablaze... but what exactly is that fuel? By the looks of it, at least a small part is a piece of
One of the oft-mentioned pitfalls of the smartphone photography movement is that we end up with a ton of photos that just stay on our phones indefinitely, never to see the light of day. This humorous video points out some of the photos that you and I both probably have sitting somewhere on our phone and that, for one reason or another, we haven't or won't ever delete.
It turns out that it does exist: a magazine that prides itself on not altering their models' faces or bodies in Photoshop. Verily is a fashion and lifestyle magazine aimed at women 18 to 35, and even though that is prime demographic territory when it comes to Photoshop use, the whole purpose of the magazine is to at least begin reversing this trend.
The world of time-lapse photography is dominated mostly by landscape and city photography, with the occasionally astronomical time-lapse thrown in. And even though we've seen some spectacular examples of all three of those (just click on the links), we appreciate that the video at the top is a bit of a departure from the norm.
Shot by MIT Professor David Gifford and graduate student Adrian Dalca, the footage is a mix of time-lapse and slow motion that shows the beauty of the Boston Ballet practicing for the September show Night of Stars.
Update: The footage has been taken down at the request of Jimmy Fallon's publicist.
If you're planning on using a baby in a future photo shoot, take note: you can't really control their emotions, and they can't really control their bladders. Of course, if you know what you're doing, you could end up with some unexpectedly great pictures anyway.
Being a photographer can sometimes be a lonely prospect. Even photographers that often work with people as subjects or on crowded streets will have to put in countless hours alone, editing their work. This fact only makes it even more important for photographers to actively reach out and form communities, if not for the sake of their work then at least for the sake of their social lives and sanity.
Believing the world cares what you had for lunch may still be a symptom of narcissism, but a recent study seems to indicate that it could at least be a useful form of narcissism.
The study, which was conducted by marketing researchers at Brigham Young University, found that the more time people spend looking at pictures of food, the less interested they become in actually eating that same foods. Results were published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
We've heard a lot about the one-of-a-kind Jonathan Ive-designed Leica M as rumors turned to official word that the camera would be auctioned off at a (RED) auction in November, but until now, we had no clue what the thing actually looked like.
An educational project in India is encouraging Muslim women to take up photography, in defiance of a controversial fatwa issued earlier this year that said the practice was "unIslamic."
Woman's advocacy group Aawaaz-e-Niswaan -- which is based in the Mumbai suburb of Kurla -- has trained more than a dozen women in photography skills, going against of regional customs and, now, this particular fatwa.
If you're an Instagram junkie who can't go a day or even an hour without posting something to the massive photo network, and you're planning on going to Australia sometime in the near future, then do we ever have the hotel for you.
Over a half a billion Apple iOS and Android systems have been sold, which means that there are now an unprecedented number of cameras in the world. This monumental increase in smartphone cameras has allowed for the dramatic increase of photos uploaded to social media sites.
I’m often overwhelmed by the fact that I can upload photos to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, 500px, VSCOcam, Artflakes, Snapchat, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, EyeEM, and on, and on, and on. Through such apps, a half billion photos are uploaded to the Internet each day. The sheer scale and accelerated growth of mobile photography and social media integration, which I’ll call the new photography, has quickly changed photography in just a few short years.
What do you get when a city council member’s office, two art nonprofits and an outdoor media company come together and agree on something? What you get is this terrific Los Angeles Public Art Project.
A couple of days ago we ran across this strange article online. Very short on details, what we know is that a man was seen taking photos of children in a suburb of Toronto a few days ago, and is now being sought after by police.
A British TV producer is working on a reality television show for photographers, in which up-and-coming artists will compete to become the country's next big fashion (though they prefer the term 'style') shooter.
Young people love to take selfies and don't really care about printing photos and putting them in albums. That might not be the biggest shocker of the year, but a new British survey at least puts some numbers to this amateur photography trend that's leaving us with a lot fewer prints and a lot more digital clutter.
Let me start by stating that I’ve been a fan of Montreal’s Slaves on Dope since the mid to late 1990s. Does that make a difference in the relevance of the rest of this blog entry? Nope. Just felt like saying that.
I’ve had the chance to shoot them a few times live and they are always fun to see…. and ever better to shoot! They were playing at the Heavy MTL festival this past August, early on the second day, and I made my way to the small stage to grab a few shots.
What if I told that you could get wedding photos at a fraction of the cost that professionals will charge you, would you be interested in that? I bet you would because there are a heck of a lot of people out there that think wedding photographers are way too expensive, charging you thousands of dollars just for a few pictures.
Memoto, the company behind the wearable camera that automatically documents the user's life by taking a photo every 30 seconds, has a new name, $3 million in fresh capital, and plans to start shipping product next month.
You've probably seen it, we've written about it, and wedding photographers in particular loathe it, but for some reason people can't stop doing it: getting in the way at weddings to get the perfect smartphone shot of the happy couple.
Having already racked up more than 3 million followers on Twitter, Pope Francis is ready to spread some photographic love soon with a full-on Instagram presence, according to Vatican sources.
Mystery semi-solved. Singer and recently-infamous celebrity Miley Cyrus' baffling sale of a used Nikon N80 SLR on eBay last week might have been part of her plan to consolidate into a digital, Canon-based workflow.
At least we can surmise as much from a recent Rolling Stone interview in which the former teen queen revealed that she considered going to photography school as part of a career reboot after her smash run on Disney's "Hannah Montana" show ended in 2011.
Just a couple of weeks before his award-winning work is supposed to appear in a major Netherlands-Russia bilateral year exhibition, Dutch photojournalist Rob Hornstra has had his application for a Russian visa denied.
Hornstra, whose "Sochi Project" with writer/filmmaker Arnold Van Bruggen paints the host country of the 2014 Winter Olympics in a less-than-favorable light, believes that this move is a result of that project.
It's time like these that hashtags like #facepalm were invented for. Thanks to a reader, we recently stumbled across a "Wedding Photographer Wanted" ad on Craigslist that we sincerely hope is fake. Then again, given previous experience, it's probably not.
I suppose we all owe a small cultural debt to this anonymous older lady at a recent Colorado Rockies game. Thanks to her, we now know what the exact opposite of a photobomb looks like.
That would be having a cranky grandma type show up in the money shot of your carefully arranged proposal, flipping the bird at the camera to show exactly how she felt about the interruption.
Before today, if you were to ask me who would win in a fight, an eagle or a deer, I would probably have bet on the deer given the obvious size advantage. But recently released shots from a wildlife camera set up in a remote corner of Siberia show how wrong I would be.
British photographer Jason Sheldon has won a settlement of £20,000 (about $32,300 US) over a stolen image of his (seen above), after initially being offered less than one percent of that.
We hate to contribute in any small way to the Miley Cyrus hoopla/shenanigans/ruckus (pick your poison) but when an old 35mm SLR that would normally go for about $60 starts bidding at almost $100,000 we can't help but take notice.
The camera in question is an old 35mm Nikon N80 SLR, and as you might have already guessed, the reason it's going for so ridiculously much is that ... well ... Miley is selling it.
In some cases, it seems like the stars align, the sea parts and the universe itself conspires to help you get the perfect shot. That's sort of what happened to photographer Richard Crawley when he attended a Rolling Stones concert in the 1970s and wound up with the most famous shot he would ever take.