I am especially impressed with the breadth and quality of Matt Lutton’s work. Lutton has yet to receive his BA, and has made some incredible work about Seattle, the Balkans, and Kosovo. Check out his site. Moakley says he would already “definitely think about putting him on assignment. He seems excited to shoot anywhere.”
Check it out here.
Elyse Butler was born to a scientist & a hippie on a volcano in the middle of the ocean.
Check it out here.
This is one of my favorite photos and one that I get most compliments on. I shot it in Trafalgar Square. Unusually I didn’t take this photo on a Leica. I was using a Canon film SLR. The Leica was in repair.
Check it out here.
by Brad Mangin
I was sitting in Finnegan’s Wake, one of my favorite bars in San Francisco with my friend Grover last month when my cell phone began making noise. I was getting a text message from Walter Iooss: “Where can I send you my new book for you to review?”
At this point in the evening, I must confess, I had consumed a few too many beers, so my first thought was that Walter had made a mistake and wanted to send an editor his new portfolio. I texted him back some smart ass remark about being drunk, probably accusing him of the same, and closed the phone, laughing.
A few minutes later, it went off again.
“For SportsShooter.com you wino! I’m sober and going to bed,” Walter said.
Check it out here.
i spent a month in scotland last summer and was going through some shots that i liked. i wanted to re-tone them and put them up. i think some of these were some of my very first posts on here. but its fun to look back at your old shots and see how your feelings about them change.
Check it out here.
The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb. Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they not be reproduced until 2008. Three of these photographs are reproduced in Atomic Tragedy with the permission of the Capp family. Now that the restriction is no longer in force, the entire set is available below.
Check it out here.
We drove for several hours today until we reached the Laos border. It was incredible to see a small checkpoint protecting the two borders. The people I was with told me there are many secret police in all of the border towns that report any suspicious activity along the border, such as illegal crossings.
Check it out here.
Existing devotees of Kodak’s T-Max 400 (TMY) will therefore have mixed feelings, but those who have not tried TMY, or have not tried it for years, are in for a pleasant surprise with 400-2TMY. Once they have adjusted to 400-2TMY (hereafter TMY2), existing TMY users should also be well pleased.
In a nutshell, it seems to do all that Kodak claims, and more. It is both sharper and finer grained, as claimed, and in our tests, it delivered better tonality; was easier to print; and was less critical in both exposure and development. The only claim we could not easily test was that it is now the sharpest ISO 400 film in the world. We don’t have a microdensitometer, and besides, comparing TMY, TMY2, and Tri-X was time-consuming and expensive enough, without adding other ISO 400 films to the mix.
Check it out here.
If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera. Let’s transform your point-and-shoot into a super camera just by adding a little special sauce to its firmware.
Check it out here.
Strobist guru David Hobby was recently featured in a USA Today article, where he was photographed by USA Today staffer H. Darr Beiser (using SB800’s with 2 of my HonlPhoto 5″ Speed Snoots). There are also 2 very informative videos to go along with it, so if you have any interest in small lighting on-the-fly, start by watching David in action in the following 2 USA Today videos.
Check it out here.
The job offer was tempting.
It was printed on a 16-foot-wide banner and strung above one of the busiest roads here, calling out to any “soldier or ex-soldier.”
“We’re offering you a good salary, food and medical care for your families,” it said in block letters.
But there was a catch: The employer was Los Zetas, a notorious Gulf cartel hit squad formed by elite Mexican army deserters. The group even included a phone number for job seekers that linked to a voice mailbox.
Check it out here.
Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore.
Here are some images from the Burley series Disappearance of Darkness, which documents the final year of the Kodak Canada facility in Toronto. This facility, which was made up of 18 buildings on a 5 hectare site, had a one hundred year history of producing photographic films and papers. It was sold in 2006 and demolished in the summer of 2007.
Check it out here.
Social adoption of technological change takes place for one of two reason…
1 – A need is determined and someone then finds a way to fulfill it
2 – A new technology evolves and people then discover what can be done with it
Check it out here.
Award season continues apace, and the next big show will occur one week from tonight when the International Center of Photography presents its coveted Infinity Awards for 2008. But the word is already out about who’ll be receiving prizes this year.
Check it out here.
by Andrew McConnell
I was on my way to visit members of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) at a jungle camp deep in the rain forests of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The FDLR is comprised of Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda after their involvement in the 1994 genocide, as well as Hutu members of the former Rwandan army and a mix of displaced Rwandan Hutus. The people number approximately 10,000; they have lived in the jungles of Congo for the past 14 years and have been one of the fundamental causes of the Congo conflict.
Check it out here.
Toronto artist Robert Burley is currently documenting the fate of chemical photography, recording the abandonment and demolition of various Kodak plants. The films, papers and processing chemicals these factories produced will soon be obsolete, although Burley himself is still physically printing images from negatives, albeit ones he edits digitally. The most notable of Burley’s large, highly detailed colour photographs shows the implosion of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, N.Y., where a crowd that includes people who worked in the plant busily snap pictures of its demise on their digital cameras. Whatever sacrifices it may demand, technology is irresistible.
Airbrushing celebrity and model photos has become so common that it’s a popular pastime for magazine readers to spot the digital manipulations. But have photo editors gone too far?
