If you had the task of choosing some photos that represented Earth and mankind to extraterrestrial life forms, which photos would you select? NASA had to do this back in 1977 when it launched the Voyager space probes, which are now the farthest human-made objects from Earth. A committee led by Carl Sagan eventually settled on 116 images:
[...] a collection of 116 pictures (one of which is for calibration) detailing but not limited to human life on earth and the planet itself. Many pictures are annotated with one or many indications of scales of time, size or mass. Some images also contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are first defined in the first few images using physical references.
Among the photos chosen was Ansel Adam’s famous Snake River and Grand Tetons photograph. Read the rest of this entry »
Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of Theory Films. Here’s the one-sentence synopsis:
A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.
No CGI was used — all the animation you see in the video was done by hand and captured on a still photograph using a Canon 5D Mark II!
An earlier post here on PetaPixel showcased a wonderful image of a flock of cell phones and the method used to create it. In a rather snarky comment, I said to get back to me when they started tossing babies, and linked to my daughter merrily jumping in her crib with her toys. Mike was kind enough to approach me about writing up a small walk-through on how I created my image, and who can honestly turn down a chance to show off their baby daughter looking so cute? Read the rest of this entry »
Just days after Holga announced a new iPhone case with 9 lens filters in a rotary dial, a new challenger emerges: the iPhone Lens Dial. Compared to the Holga case, it’s much more professional looking — but equally as bizarre. The oversized dial packs three different lenses (wide angle, fisheye, and telephoto) into one aircraft-grade aluminum case. The price is prohibitive to all but the most obsessed iPhoneographers though: each case costs a cool $249.
Rodney Smith of The End Starts Here has written an interesting piece on the topic of smiling, and argues that smiling is a “false sentiment” that separates a casual photograph from a portrait:
The truth is no portrait of substance has people smiling. Look at the history of painting, Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, Velasquez, Sargent, Vermeer, DaVinci, etc., the subjects gaze to the viewer is neutral at best, neither inviting nor forbidding. It is there for the viewer to see and feel.
Smiling is like much of American popular culture, superficial and misleading. It is part of our vernacular, but it should be expunged in photographs.
You can find some famous portrait paintings made throughout history here. Virtually all of them support this argument.
What if framing a scene with your fingers actually caused photos to be created? Air Camera is a clever camera concept by designer Yeon Su Kim that would make that idea a reality. It consists of two components: a ring-like camera worn on the thumb, and a tension-sensing device worn on the forefinger. If the tension unit senses that you’re making a camera gesture, it triggers the camera to snap a photo. Make a video camera gesture, and it begins recording video! The resulting photos would also be synced automatically with your smartphone. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve seen that Google Street View imagery is capable of winning photojournalism awards, but how would the camera-equipped cars do as fine art photographers? Photographer Aaron Hobson has a fascinating gallery of fine art-style photographs found in Street View — cinematic photos that would look great blown up and exhibited on museum walls. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week we featured Jason Hull’s awesome nightlights created out of old (and cheap) vintage cameras. If you’ve been dying to learn how you can make one yourself, today’s your lucky day: Hull has written up a step-by-step tutorial showing how the conversion is done. If you do attempt this project, try to find a broken camera — working ones are happiest when they’re used for photo-making!
French animator and photographer Micaël Reynaud took a large number of black & white head shots by photographer Michael Jang and turned them into this super trippy video showing the faces morph through a ripple effect. You can also find an animated GIF of the morphing here.
