One of standout commercials during the Super Bowl yesterday was the above ad by Chrysler promoting its Ram line of trucks. The 2-minute ad pays tribute to farmers across the nation, and is composed entirely of photographs showing various facets of the farming industry.
In the background is a famous speech given by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey during the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention, titled "So God Made a Farmer."
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has become one of the hottest stars in Hollywood in recent years, appearing in a number of major blockbuster movies (e.g. Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Lincoln). Back in 2006, as he was still a smaller name in the industry, Gordon-Levitt had a run-in with a couple of paparazzi photographers.
Having a video camera with him, Gordon-Levitt decided to turn the camera lens on the two men to capture a glimpse into the world of celebrity photography. The encounter can be seen in the video above, titled "Pictures of A**holes," which Gordon-Levitt uploaded to YouTube (Warning: there's some strong language).
Here's a bizarre tale of Photoshop and fraud: Back in August of 2012, TechCrunch published a piece accusing a young woman named Shirley Hornstein of tricking Silicon Valley with Photoshopped photographs. By inserting herself into other people's snapshots with the rich and famous, and by using made-up job titles and citing non-existent connections, Hornstein was able to wiggle into inner circles of the valley's tech elite.
A 15-year-old boy in Colorado has been arrested for cyber-bulling using Instagram. He is being charged with five counts of third-degree harassment for allegedly downloading photographs of his classmates from Facebook and then uploading them to an anonymous Instagram account with hurtful captions attached.
NPR sparked a debate regarding photojournalism, ethics, and privacy this past Monday after publishing a story titled, "What It Feels Like To Be Photographed In A Moment Of Grief" on its photography blog.
The discussion revolved around the photograph above, which AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand captured in the evening after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Travel photographer and HDR guru Trey Ratcliff is selling this clever T-shirt over in his Stuck In Customs online store. It's titled "Camera Sutra," and shows various shooting positions photographers assume in order to capture the perfect shot.
Earlier this week, Iran generated quite a bit of media attention after claiming that it had successfully sent a monkey to space and safely brought it back down to Earth. The tiny monkey was reportedly sent into sub-orbital space 75 miles above ground.
To prove its accomplishment, Iran distributed the above photograph of the monkey strapped into its little spaceship chair.
We've seen Instagram photography on "jewelry" before, but nothing like this. JewelGram is the Kickstarter baby of engineer Gianpiero Riva and jewelry designer Michele Marzotto, and if they get fully funded, we may start seeing high quality Instagram rings and pendents all over the place.
The tech world has been buzzing over the past couple of days about …
Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo closed its doors at the end of last year. Given the transformation photography has gone through over the past decade, it hardly came as a surprise. At its core, the success, survival, and eventual demise of 60 Minute Photo is just another familiar story of a business fighting against the moving current of technology. It’s closure, however, reveals something important, something personal. It represents a shift in how we create and preserve our memories and a deepening of the divide between customer and proprietor.
One would hope that the medium of photography was immune to racial prejudice, but an exhibit by London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin shows that this was not always the case. The artists' exhibit, on display at Johannesburg's Goodman Gallery, explores the marks that racism left on early color photography.
Using film designed to capture white faces and a camera that became infamous for helping further apartheid in South Africa, Broomberg and Chanarin took photos of beautiful South African flora -- putting the once-racial implements to better use.
You've probably seen chocolate-colored DSLR cameras before, but have you ever seen DSLR-shaped chocolate? The camera above was created by San Francisco-based Etsy seller Hans Chung as a gift for his friends and family. It's a highly detailed solid chocolate replica of a Canon 60D that has a battery grip attached.
If you seriously want to nerd out in the area of photography-related fashion, check out this T-shirt by The Unrefinery. It's titled "Crop It," and is available for $24.
Here's a bit of lighthearted humor as we heat up the bloggin' machine today: at the second inauguration of Barack Obama this past Monday, a number of humorous photobombs were spotted in the live television coverage and in the press photos that emerged afterward. A few of them have the web talking (and laughing).
In the photograph above by Jim Bourg of Reuters, we see New York Senator Chuck Schumer photobombing during the oath of office.
The painting above is the first official portrait of Kate Duchess of Cambridge (formerly known as Kate Middleton). When it was unveiled to the public earlier this month, art critics around the world bashed it for making Kate look ghostly and much older than she actually is. On the receiving end of all the criticism has been British artist Paul Emsley, the man who photographed Kate Middleton and then turned one of the photos into the painting seen above.
A new piece over at The New York Times is bringing to light an issue that, to be honest, we hadn't realized had gotten so bad. Apparently, amateur food photography is out of control, forcing many restaurants to begin implementing bans or other photo related policies.
For several years now, my occupation has been to basically read everything written about new equipment. In order to help everyone save time, and to save the Internet millions of electrons, I have developed a concise method to summarize all such discussions for all newly introduced imaging equipment.
I modestly call this Roger’s Law of New Product Introduction and have summarized it in the graph above. You will notice there are two possible paths a new product may follow. To date, these two paths accurately describe every introduced product.
Back in November, Brazilian model Nana Gouvea felt the Internet's wrath after she used the Hurricane Sandy aftermath as a backdrop to further her career. Needless to say, those photos did garner attention, just not the kind she wanted.
Now Vogue is on an eerily similar hot seat after their most recent issue contained a high fashion spread honoring Sandy responders. General opinion seems to be that the photos were in bad taste, relegating the first responders to 'prop' status while the Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors clad models took center stage.
Being out on the roads is dangerous, be you a donkey in Botswana, a deer in New York, or a Google Street View driver. Things don't get newsworthy, however, until one of the first two meets up with the third.
This past Sunday, there was a 2-hour-long police chase in Inglewood, California. A man named Jason Lee was watching …
After sharing that short feature yesterday on the last roll of Kodachrome, it seems appropriate to share this once-super-popular song written about the same film.
Simply titled, "Kodachrome," it was written by American musician Paul Simon after the first breakup of Simon & Garfunkel.
Here’s Shoebox’s humorous take on the difference between film and digital …
For those of you who can't stand what paparazzi photographers do with their cameras, know this: it's not just the professional celebrity photographers who do such things. When a celebrity is spotted in public, ordinary people all around pull out their cameras and do exactly the same thing.
The video above shows what happened recently when Tom Cruise and his daughter Suri tried to watch a show at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Florida.
When doing trainspotting photography, it pays to be extra alert and aware of your surroundings. The video above, captured at the Thurston, Suffolk train station, shows how one camera-wielding trainspotter almost learned (or didn't learn) that lesson the hard way.
National Geographic has announced the winners of its 2012 Photo Contest, which received over 22,000 entries from photographers around the world. The photograph above, captured by Ashley Vincent and titled "The Explosion!," was chosen as the Grand Prize winner and the top image in the "Nature" category.
Want to know how much film you and your camera are chewing through? John Sypal over at …
When you mention the words "vacation photos," most people might think of trips to the mountains or to the beach. Not Toshifumi Fujimoto. The 45-year-old Japanese trucker is passionate about "war tourism" -- he actually takes on the role of a conflict photographer when on vacation. In recent days, he has been shooting on the front lines of the Syrian civil war, putting his life on the line for images that he keeps as a personal collection rather than sells for reportage purposes.
A week before Christmas last month, Leica launched a contest to spread some holiday cheer. Instead of asking its fans to make photographs, however, the company asked them to bake cookies and cakes.
If you ever find yourself wondering what it's like to be hunted by a hungry polar bear, just ask filmmaker Gordon Buchanan. While shooting wildlife imagery in Svalbard, Norway for a BBC series titled The Polar Bear Family and Me, Buchanan was approached by a giant 1,000lb, 8-foot-tall polar bear. Luckily for Buchanan, he was in a tiny Plexiglas enclosure. Luckily for the BBC, Buchanan was able to capture the 45-minute ordeal on film.
Tommy Edison is an incredible person. Born blind, he has managed to lead a successful, fulfilling life as a film critic, receiving national attention for his spot on reviews of movies like "Water for Elephants." But in addition to successfully reviewing a genre most would consider to be in the domain of the sighted, Mr. Edison is also a prolific Instagram user.
Several mugshot websites -- including Just Mugshots, Busted! Mugshots, Mugshots Online, and MugRemove -- are ringing in the new year with a massive class action law suit. According to NPR, hundreds of people who have been exonerated of all charges and had their records sealed are suing the websites for not only keeping their mugshots up and using them in banner ads, but refusing to take them down and "scrub" them off the Internet unless the victims pay a hefty fee.
For a New Year's greeting ecard this year, Paris-based photographer Noël Bourcier decided to put his camera equipment to good use, but not in the way you'd expect. He gathered up some of the camera equipment at the EFET School's photography program, recruited a couple of photography students, and turned the equipment into the simple stop-motion ecard seen above.
It's not easy to remember life before Photoshop. When we do, we think of a world where picture were straightforward, always showing exactly what happened to be in front of the lens when the exposure was taken. But that's not entirely the case.
Trick photography has been around for centuries, and even though the folks in Victorian times weren't nearly as concerned with artificially slimming down, they did like to have some photographic fun once in a while. This set of headless photographs from the 19th century is a great example of the kind of 'fun' we're talking about.
Painter Norman Rockwell's illustrations graced the covers of countless magazines over the course of the 20th century, becoming a much-loved piece of American culture for their simple snapshots of life. You might recognize many of the works, and even the name behind the paintings, but did you know that virtually all of the images started out as photographs?
Photographer Michel Jones has one of the most unique photography-related tattoos we've seen yet. While most photography enthusiasts who get inked may choose designs that are easily recognizable by the general public (e.g. cameras, lenses, photos), Jones went with a design that is enigmatic to most people and even foreign to many photographers. His tattoo is based on the backing paper that comes with 120 film.
Last month we shared the story of a photographer who had his DSLR stolen and used by a lion. Wildlife photographer Dean Swartz had a similar experience recently with a different (and much larger) predator: a black bear.
Check out this portrait photograph of Swedish artist Fredrik Saker. It's actually a self-portrait that Saker painted by hand. While we've seen and shared photo-realistic drawings before, Saker's came up with a clever way of validating his photo's realism: he managed to have it approved as his drivers license photo.
After the Instagram Terms of Service controversy erupted this past week, Randall Munroe of XKCD published …
If you had any doubts regarding how much of a part of our culture Instagram has become, just take a peek at the public outcry that erupted after Instagram announced changes to its policies yesterday. The controversial edits were reported in media outlets around the world, and legions of die-hard Instagram fans took to social media channels to protest them.
People mainly focused on a section of the document that appears to give Instagram sweeping permissions to sell photos without consent or compensation to third-parties for advertising purposes.
Lens-shaped coffee mugs and vacuum flasks (the proper name for the Thermos) have become a hot novelty item in the world of photography over the past couple of years, and Leica wants a piece of the action. Two weeks ago, a Leica-branded coffee mug was spotted on eBay, and now it appears that the strange product will be hitting store shelves at brick-and-mortar Leica retail locations.
Earlier this year, we wrote about a dangerous new Russian photo fad called "skywalking," in which thrill-seeking climber-photographers seek out the highest man-made structures they can find, climb to the apexes without proper safety equipment, and then shoot photographs of themselves and the view once they're there.
Two of the photographers who have been generating a lot of buzz in this niche are Vitaly Raskalov and Alexander Remnev.
Russian wildlife photographer Igor Shpilenok captured this perfect Kodak moment of another shooter …
Here's a slightly-oldie but a very-goodie: New York University photography professor Fred Ritchin gave this keynote address last year at the "What's Next?" event put on by Foam. He shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of digital photography and how it impacts the world around us.
We've shared a number of photography-inspired tattoos in the past, but here's a concept we've never seen before. Brunssum, Netherlands-based tattoo artist Helma van der Weide created this optical illusion tattoo for her daughter Lotte van den Acker's forearm. All Lotte needs to do to show off her passion for photography is cover up her eyes with her arm and voila! Instant photography!
Less than a week removed from the train photographer tragedy in Sacramento, California, another sad story has made its way across our desks. A 23-year-old man named Nicholas Wieme died in the pursuit of a "rooftopping" photograph yesterday after he fell into a building's smokestack in Chicago.
When the engineering students and staff of King's College in London gathered together to take a faculty portrait, the photographer used an old camera that panned from left to right in order to capture an extremely long panorama of the entire group in one frame. It worked a bit like the panorama features on modern smartphones: start the exposure on one side of the frame, and then gradually sweep the camera across the scene while everyone in the frame stays as still as possible.
The New York Post sparked a firestorm of controversy last week after publishing a photo of a man about to be struck by a subway train. People around the world were outraged that a photographer decided to photograph what had occurred, that he had sold (or, in the photographer's words, licensed) the photo to a newspaper, and that the paper decided to publish it with a sensationalist front page story.
Check out this unique necklace created by artist Ashley Gilreath last year. Called "I Am Who They Were," the piece is designed to represent Gilreath's memories of climbing up the stairway in her grandparents' house -- a stairway lined with family photographs.
Here's a photo that's currently going viral on the web. As with many other viral photos, it's being shared with all kinds of different descriptions, and people are simply passing it on to family and friends without bothering to verify whether or not the captions are real.
New York City gallery W/------ (pronounced "with") seems to think that art buying has gotten a bit snobby, and that photographers have gotten a bit used to having unlimited chances to capture the perfect shot. Enter their new Disposable Cameras project, currently on display at the NADA art fair in Miami through this weekend. If you visit W/------'s booth at the fair, you'll find a wall of 24 hanging disposable cameras, each with a very hefty price tag.