Culture

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.