This fascinating video shows how Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden does his street photography in New York City. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of person it takes to capture closeup shots of people in a place like NYC, this video may be very interesting to you. He’s the complete opposite of someone who stands on the other side of the street, using a telephoto to “get close”.

(via Reddit)

Luis Caldevilla creates beautiful time-lapse videos and publishes them to his website, timelapses.tv. He recently received his 1 millionth video view, and created this montage video to celebrate the occasion. It can give you quite a few ideas for things to make time-lapses of.

Here’s a video that’s so creative and awesome it’s sure to get your artistic juices flowing. OK Go just put up the music video to their song “This Too Shall Pass”, and it’s one of the coolest music videos I’ve ever seen. Basically the whole video shows a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built in a warehouse, with the timing and placement of every person and element perfectly integrated into the song.

I wonder how many takes this video required.

(via Boing Boing)

Despite what your eyes tell you, the above image is a photograph of a real person, not a painting. It was taken by Peter Kun Frary, a music professor at the University of Hawaii. He tells us,

Recently I walked by the Ala Moana Center Mac (cosmetic) store and noticed a crowd of Japanese tourists gawking and snapping pics. A model in full body paint was posing against a set on an open air stage in front of the store. I thought she was a darn good simulation of a late 19th or early 20th century French oil painting. Although there were no stage lights, natural sunlight light was diffused through white cloth canopy to reduce shadows and contrast.

We can imagine an artist doing a whole series of photographs that look exactly like paintings. Has this been done before? Link us if so!

(via Gizmodo)

Image credit: Photograph by Peter Kun Frary and used with permission.

Our jaws dropped when we came across Matthew Albanese’s work. He uses everyday materials to create astonishingly detailed small-scale miniatures of stunning landscapes, and then photographs them using forced perspective techniques.

Here’s his statement and a taste of his work:

My work involves the construction of small-scale meticulously detailed models using various materials and objects to create emotive landscapes. Every aspect from the construction to the lighting of the final model is painstakingly pre-planned using methods which force the viewers perspective when photographed from a specific angle. Using a mixture of photographic techniques such as scale, depth of field, white balance and lighting I am able to drastically alter the appearance of my materials.

Tornado made of steel wool, cotton, ground parsley and moss

Paprika Mars. Made out of 12 pounds paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder and charcoal

Volcano, “Breaking Point”, made out of tile grout, cotton, phosphorous ink. This model volcano was illuminated from within by 6-60 watt light bulbs.

Aurora Borealis. This one was made by photographing a beam of colored light against a black curtain to achieve the edge effect. The trees were composited from life ( so far the only real life element in any of these images) The stars are simply strobe light through holes in cork board.

Fields, After the Storm. This model is simply made out of faux fur(fields), cotton (clouds) and sifted tile grout(mountains). The perspective is forced as in all of my images, and the lighting effect was created by simply shifting the white balance.

To see more of Matthew’s work, you can visit his website.

American Pixels is an experiment by Jörg Colberg that uses a special kind of image compression algorithm to create a distinct look. Here’s Colberg’s statement:

These “American Pixels” are an experiment. Image formats like jpeg (or gif) use compression algorithms to save space, while trying to retain a large fraction of the original information. A computer that creates a jpeg does not know anything about the contents of the image: It does what it is told, in a uniform manner across the image.

My idea was to create a variant that followed in the footsteps of what jpegs do, but to have the final result depend on the original image: in a very direct way the computer algorithm becomes part of the image creation. The idea was to build a hierarchical compression algorithm, where the compression – in effect the pixel size – depends on the information in each uncompressed pixel and its neighbours. So adaptive compression (acomp) is a new image algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

[...] What is more, it produces images that have spatial depth: as you zoom in you can see more and more details. acomps are designed for a wall: The viewer has to be able to walk back and forth in front of them.

Basically, the algorithm leaves detail where there needs to be detail, and compresses areas of less detail. By doing this, the resulting image doesn’t look entirely realistic, yet doesn’t look entirely artificial either.

Back in 2005, a student in England named Alex Tew launched The Million Dollar Homepage, through which he sold the pixels of a 1000×1000 grid for $1 each. Although it was an extremely simple idea, the unique project attracted enormous amounts of press coverage, and eventually earned $1,037,100 in a matter of months. It also spawned countless copycat websites that virtually all failed, since the idea was no longer novel.

Now, Colorado-based artist Shane Rich (@oncemany) might have devised the next surprisingly-profitable — yet super-simple — idea, this time photography-related. His new website, oncemany, is a photo-a-day Project 365 with a twist: each day of the year is purchased by a company or individual that wants to promote something. Rich gives the sponsor complete exposure on that day, collaborates with them for the resulting photograph, and provides a high-quality signed print.

The cost of purchasing a day is creative as well — the price of each day is the day of the year. This means January 1st costs $1 to buy, and December 31st costs $365. If you’re wondering how much the total for the year would be, it’s $66,795, assuming he succeeds in booking every single date. So far, there has been no shortage of sponsors, with most dates early in the year booked already.

Regardless of whether or not he succeeds, oncemany is sure to spawn many similar or even identical projects. However, like in business it’s often the first-mover that gets all of the pie, and by the end you might be wishing you had thought of this idea first.

(via PhotoInduced)