The 684th triple play in the history of baseball happened yesterday in a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, and Boston Globe staff photographer Jim Davis managed to capture photos of the rare occurrence (they happen a few times per year) through anticipation and preparedness. Here’s a short video in which Davis explains how he did it.
Thanks for the tip, @tmwsiy!
Ryan McGinnis is a photographer and storm chaser. You can visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Ryan McGinnis: I am a storm chaser and photographer who lives in Nebraska; I have no formal training in photography outside of all the books I’ve read and the thousands of rolls of film I’ve blown through (and terabytes of drives I’ve filled up) over the years. I’ve had a life-long love affair with the weather; from as young as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with storms and for most of my childhood I dreamed of one day chasing tornadoes. Living in this part of the country makes storm chasing less of a chore than if I had to drive here from, say, Virginia, but storm chasing here still requires lots of driving — on average around 600 miles per chase. These days I tend to storm chase around 15,000 miles a year, mostly in May and June. In 2008 and 2009 I was fortunate enough to get to tag along with and photographically document Project Vortex 2, a $12M science mission to learn how tornadoes tick, which was probably one of the best freelance investments of time and money I’ve ever made.
When I’m not shooting storms, my favorite subjects are candids and urban panoramas.
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FastCompany paid a visit to the Instagram offices in San Francisco recently to chat with founder Kevin Systrom:
CEO Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team are exactly what you picture when thinking of scrappy startup entrepreneurs: four guys in a room. Literally, there are only four people at Instagram. And they’re working in a corner of a shared tech office in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood.
Some interesting facts mentioned in the interview: the service is growing at a rate of 1.3-1.4 million users per month, they’re planning an Android version, they haven’t spent a dime on marketing, and the current app is only the “tip of the iceberg” in their plans to change how we take and share photos.
Kevin Systrom Says Instagram Is More Than Just A Pretty Picture [FastCompany]
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his “deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States” and for his pioneering use of color in fine art photography. At age 14, he sold three photographs to the Museum of Modern Art, and at 24, he became the second living photographer to do a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this video, Shore talks a little about his work and shares some of his thoughts on photography.
(via xatakafoto)
Editor’s note: This is the second interview we’ve done with Haje. The first was back in 2010 regarding his blog Photocritic.org
Haje Jan Kamps is the entrepreneur behind the Triggertrap and the blogger behind Photocritic.org.
PetaPixel: Can you tell quickly describe the Triggertrap for people who haven’t heard of it yet?
Haje Jan Kamps: Triggertrap is an universal camera trigger. It’s “universal”, because it’s designed to connect just about any trigger source to nearly any camera. Right now, we’re supporting more than a hundred camera models, but we’re adding new cameras to our Supported Cameras list all the time.
The device has a sound and light sensor built in, and it can do linear and non-linear time-lapses. I’m most excited about the auxiliary port, though, which enables users to connect nearly anything they want to the device. One reader suggested connecting it to the final buzzer they use at basketball games, to take a photo of the state of play just when the buzzer sounds — what a great idea!
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Oleg Gutsol is the co-founder and technical director of photo-sharing service 500px.
PetaPixel: Can you tell me a little about yourself and your background?
Oleg Gutsol: Ian and I met during our university years at Ryerson, around 2004. He was in business and finance program and I was in computer science. We both liked photography, travel and motorcycles, so there were some common points of interest. I think we both shared a passion for working on something meaningful, and although then we were not working together, we both were exploring opportunities to start our own business.
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Jonathan Blaustein is the photographer behind the project “The Value of a Dollar“, which went viral on the Internet in 2010 and then was subsequently acquired by the State of New Mexico and the Library of Congress. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Jonathan Blaustein: I’m a photographer, writer, and professor based in Taos, New Mexico, originally from New Jersey (who isn’t?). In addition to my career as a photographer, I’m also a correspondent for the photo industry blog A Photo Editor. My family and I live in a little horse pasture at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, far from everywhere. I’m pretty fortunate, as Northern New Mexico has a really vibrant photography scene, and of course our light is legendary. As far as my background goes, I first studied History and Economics at Duke University, but returned to school to study photography, and I have an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I’ve been a practicing artist for the last 15 years, and my work has been exhibited in galleries, alternative spaces and museums around the United States.
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Here’s a neat behind-the-scenes video by Samsung featuring short interviews with the developers and engineers behind its NX lenses. One of the things I found interesting was how the engineers are constantly working to overcome the prejudice that Korean-made lenses are inferior to those crafted in Japan or Germany. The video also briefly shows a Samsung 300mm f2.8 XF ED lens — a lens that doesn’t officially exist.
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Yuri Arcurs — AKA the “King of Microstock” — is the best selling microstock photographer in the world, selling over 2,000 images a day and 2 million a year. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Yuri Arcurs: I was born in 1976 in Aarhus, Denmark, where I still live with my fiance, Cecilie, and our dog, Maff. As a child I spent some years in the U.S. but I returned to Denmark and joined the army, and later on I continued with my studies in Psychology at Aarhus Univerity. These days I feel like I’m not doing much else besides stock photography, but when I do have time for other things I really enjoy a good work-out. I have always been a very active person, which was probably one of the reasons I joined the army when I was younger, but right now I try to focus all of my energy on stock. So, unfortunately, marathons and the likes will have to wait!
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Yesterday we reported that artist Richard Prince had just lost a copyright infringement lawsuit against a photographer he appropriated images from. Here’s an interesting snippet from an interview with Prince in which he shares his views on this matter:
Copyright has never interested me. For most of my life I owned half a stereo so there was no point in suing me, but that’s changed now and it’s interesting. I’m actually in the situation where I am being sued at the moment (by a French photographer I might add) for taking his original images and turning them into paintings. It’s something that’s really problematic for me because in a strange way now I find myself censoring things that I look at and it’s almost like I can’t do it anymore, because people know who you are. So sometimes it’s better not to be successful and well known and you can get away with much more. I knew what I was stealing 30 years ago but it didn’t matter because no one cared, no one was paying any attention. It was an attitude to do with the fact that I didn’t think there was a future.
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