The storytelling power of images. Here is a beautiful example of the marriage of words and visuals, conveying a story that is above both words and images. Johanna Nordblad holds the world record in free-diving under ice. For 50 meters she lets herself glide through the ice-cold water, without oxygen, wearing only a neoprene suit. […]
Photos document a timeline, are a snapshot of body and mind at certain times along our lives. Photos allow for time travel. Looking at an image from the past might explain moods and things and connections that were not obvious at the time. This might have a therapeutic effect. Looking for clues in how I […]
By NIGEL FOGG A Portrait by Marsha Burns Can I begin by crying? She is so frail, so strong, so shocking, so beautiful, so young, so damaged, so afraid, so courageous, so angry, so old, so wise, so determined, so veiled, so strident, so hurtful, so full of life… More than we seem able to […]
Street photography and shyness, they don’t match, do they. Street photography requires an outgoing personality, eager to not mind what passersby think, not shying away from even confronting people. People can get upset if not aggressive when they see a stranger’s camera pointed at them. Some photographers just don’t care. Others are careful enough to […]
John Berger, the politically committed critic, novelist, screenwriter, lyricist, dramatist, essyist, activist and, above all, photographer, John Berger is dead. He passed away on January 1 in Paris after a long illness, a few weeks after his 90th birthday. As photographers we owe many things to John Berger, above all to his equally influential and […]
By NIGEL FOGG Optics have been mystifying all of us since the 15th century. In an illuminating book called Secret Knowledge (there’s also a BBC series), David Hockney investigates a hunch that, down the centuries, the abilities of hundreds of artists in the small matter of draftsmanship has something very strange about it. With a […]
Wasn’t even aware of Prisma, but nice addition to my photo app collection. Apple published its annual Best of 2016 charts for the App Store, crowning photo editing app Prisma as the iPhone App of the Year. Released in June 2016, Prisma is designed to turn photographs into works of art using a range of […]
Here’s a great project — kind of eternizes your photographs: Shots/on\Stone are black-and-white photographic prints which founder Tom Bates develops by hand on natural stone tiles in a darkroom in Vienna, Austria. The process involves painting a stone with photographic emulsion, exposing a negative image and developing the stone in photographic chemicals. Whilst some companies […]
Beautiful storytelling by former freelance photographer Amos Chapple, published by RFE/RL: On Siberia’s Ice Highway. Subtitled “A journey with the men who make their living on thin ice,” Chapple managed to join the ride of a lifetime. And because he has proven he’s able to get the story, he’s now staff at RFE/RL. The job […]
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) wasn’t the easiest of characters. The American photographer challenged conventions and feared no controversy. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad (Mr. Mapplethorpe’s camera) and began taking photographs of artists, composers and socialites. Be became known for his sensitive yet blunt, highly stylized black-and-white photography. His work featured celebrity portraits, […]
You may have missed it, but Anton Corbjin bowed out of professional photography. Might be because photography as a slow, analog form of art is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute — that’s six billion each month — , and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital […]
In a new book, data-viz guru Nicholas Felton highlights a wave of photographers mixing deep data into their art. The infographic designer is the ohor of Personal Annual Reports that weave measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics to reflect the year’s activities. Now the creator of the Reporter app and Facebook’s Timeline […]
The recent National Geographic Travel Contest, edition 2015, made me think. How come that the first prize of such a certainly prestigious contest goes to a black-and-white photograph, a photograph of divers swimming near a humpback whale off the western coast of Mexico. What a capture. The winner a black-and-white image; this in the days […]
Not much is left of the traditional camera. Give or take a few years, and mechanical shutters may be a thing of the past. Even though, what is photography without a shutter’s distinct sound. Countless variations of the “click” have persisted into the smartphone age, as the signal that an instant has been frozen in […]
Behind Photographs — it’s a one of a kind photobook by Tim Mantoani, a photographer from San Diego who produced editorial imagery for Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and ESPN, as well as advertising photography for Fortune 500 companies. His love of photography led to tracking down and photographing the shooters behind some of the world’s most […]
A thought fun pondering is how the old philosophers, thinkers and artists would have dealt with the onslaught of the digital revolution. How people whose only means of expression was the pen and brush would have made use of new communication technologies. Imagine Salvador Dali with a digital camera and image manipulation — right, he’d […]
Japanese are known for their kinky tendencies. The island often surprises the rest of the world with the weird and wonderful. And beautiful things can happen when you mix the Japanese sense of awkward imagination with Hasselblad: a remarkable catwalk fashion show, supported by the high-end camera maker, has helped amputee women in Japan to […]
Meet Beth Moon, a photographer based in San Francisco, has traveled the world since the beginning of this millennium in search of the world’s oldest trees. Since 14 years she is traveling the globe to capture the most magnificent, ancient trees that grow in remote locations and tell stories that look as old as the […]
It’s actually a nice idea, letting kids interact with old stuff some of us feel nostalgic about, such as a rotary phone, the Beatles, etc. That’s what the YouTube channel Kids React is about. A latest episode: kids reacting to a film camera. Take a fancy Canon Sure Shot 85 Zoom that uses 35mm film. […]
Doesn’t matter one iota that the following video is curated by a computer graphics artist. On the contrary. Computer graphics and photography have much in common, for instance the same roots. Computer graphics tend to become even more realistic while the prevailing post-processing in digital photography implicates visual proximity to, well, computer-generated visuals. Yet, in […]
The “Breaking Bad” of photography: National Geographic posts the antitheses to the rules of photography. Learn the rules of photography, then break them. Imagine everyone would apply the rule of thirds all the time… Making one’s own rules is one of photography’s beauties. Imagine it would be an exact science — we’d all look and […]
Tonight, however, I am restless. I sit at the dining room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for? All day long I’ve been scavenging, poking around in rooms and closets, peering at their things, studying them. I arrange my rolls of exposed film into long rows and count and recount them as […]
The photography world is in hyperactivity. It’s biennial Photokina time, lots of exciting announcements, just to mention the-wait-is-over Canon 7D Mark II (Amazon / B&H Photo / Adorama), world’s probably top APS-C camera. Photography sites and forums are flooded with enthusiasm, exasperation and bad blood, so let’s swim a bit against the tide of nonstop […]
Photography, like life itself, changed radically over the past few decades. The photography of city life especially — these days simply called “street photography” — has developed into an own new genre like the new urban scenery itself. Now a book titled The World Atlas of Street Photography showcases the work of 100 contemporary photographers, […]
Photography, a meritocracy? Wrong, says Gregory Heisler, known for his evocative portrait work often found on magazine covers. Photography is about relationships, Heisler says. Ultimately people are curious and want to meet and know you, the photographer. And photography today, he says, is vision based. People don’t want a particular style, but a vision, a […]
By IHTISHAM KABIR When photography was invented in 1840, literature warmly greeted it. Why? I think the ability of photographs to precisely describe what is in front of the camera caught the imagination of writers who felt less threatened by photography than painters did. Authors as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Ruskin […]
Photography is a lot about finding one’s one style. Nothing more boring than shooting the Eiffel Tower. Everyone does it. Nothing more exciting than shooting the Eiffel Tower. So many unique angles and perspectives, different lightings and framings left to be explored and discovered! That’s the beauty of photography. Each and every moment offers a […]
The photos we take are an expression what we’re looking for, not necessarily what we’re looking at. Every camera we use, we use as an extension of who we are. This short video makes you want to go out and try to capture the street, the nearby forest, the mood. It makes you smile — […]
VSCO, digital photography’s probably leading solution for the emulation of film, wants you to live the artist in you and get a scholarship of the $1,000,000 Artist Initiative. The initiative is a fund providing photographers the resources to pursue their creative vision. It honors art and artist by discovering, funding, advising and promoting creatives from […]
By YVAN COHEN, LIGHTROCKET “The camera never lies,” goes the adage, and for a long time we almost believed it. While photographs could never lay claim to being entirely truthful, there was a sense that an image recorded on film was as close as we could get to a freeze-frame of real life. Photography has […]
