The best camera
“The best camera is the one you have with you.” If you don’t think that’s true, check out this amazing series of gorgeous photos taken on iPhones.
There really is something magical about having a camera this powerful in your pocket all the time.
Photo shot on iPhone 7 by Erdem Summak
The elegant design of human towers
In Catalonia, Spain (where my wife’s family is from, coincidentally), they have a tradition of creating massive towers of human beings. They stand on each other’s shoulders and rise into the sky, like living sandcastles, only to collapse again from gravity and — I assume — exhaustion.
But photography has captured those elusive moments in some breathtaking images, showing off the careful symmetrical design and engineering of these temporary bio structures. Check it out.
World Cup-themed hot dogs
And while we’re dealing with sickening-looking but interesting food……
Tom Davie bottles food
I haven’t posted in SO long! I guess blogging (at least for me) seems to come in waves. Maybe this is the start of a swell.
In any case, here’s a great concept that shows how packaging controls your perception. (Bleagh!)
Thanks once again to the ever-enlightening Designboom.
Portraits of huge storms
Sometimes, nature is the best designer. But it helps to have a committed and talented photographer to document her creations.
Here’s a little 6-minute TED talk with some stunning images and a beautiful personal view to go with it.
[ted id=1763]
A trillion frames a second
You’ve seen photos of a bullet passing through an apple, right? Light itself is a million times faster. But now Ramesh Raskar and MIT Media Lab have invented a way to capture photons at a trillion frames a second. Want to see how it’s done? Check out this video.
Colorizing: vision or violation?
What happens to the meaning of an iconic black & white photo when it’s meticulously reinterpreted as a color image? Do we gain insight? Or do we lose the impact and value of the original image? Or both?
As you’ll see if you read the comments, this series by Swedish artist and photo restoration expert Sanna Dullaway invites controversy.
Personally, I think it’s a fascinating experiment, and helps me see how the photographers worked — interpreting the colorful world around them as black & white compositions, capturing the “decisive moment”, seeing what we mere mortals might have overlooked.
100 year old Russians
Sart woman in Uzbekhistan (1910)
Color photography from the 1910s? Yep.
My sister in law, Mariana, who lives in Stockholm, sent me this link to a fantastic collection of color photos of Russia, created a century ago. The process of making these was laborious — multiple long exposures were shot through different filters. The resulting plates were projected through colored glass. When the images lined up, the result was spectacularly realistic color photos.
If you look at the shot of the group of children, where it was impossible to get everyone to hold still long enough to keep the images in register, you can get a visual idea of what was going on.
Thank you, ma belle belle-soeur!
Pete Seeger and Friends
I get a lot of photographers’ promotional emails. And I mean a lot. So when one of them breaks through the clutter – and my tendency to glance and delete — it seems worth sharing.
C. Taylor Crothers was lucky enough to shoot Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden. Man, would I have loved to have been there!
Instead, I get to live vicariously through a series of portraits he shot of some 40 of the musicians — a work he calls Clearwater Portraits, Read More
What else is new?
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Happy New Year! January 1,2021