About a week ago I did a shoot with the band Strange Birds as we were walking there was a point that I saw light rays trickling down right in front of us. I told all of the guys to stop and arranged them to my liking.
One of the most important things about shooting for me is having an idea of you want the photo to come out in the very end. I tend to adjust my white balance in camera and set almost everything up so it makes less work on the computer and closer to the final product. Below is the original image: Read the rest of this entry »
Portrait photographer Gregory Heisler has done quite a few portraits for Time Magazine covers, including a few for their Person of the Year issues. This is an informative video where he steps through how he went about photographing Rudy Giuliani at the top of Rockefeller Center with the Empire State Building in the background. If you’re interested at all in portraiture and/or lighting, you’ll find this video quite educational. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an interesting peek at how Annie Leibovitz goes about shooting a portrait. This was for a Louis Vuitton advertisement a while back featuring Sean Connery. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s the old adage, it’s not the camera that makes the photographer, but according to a by-the-numbers study by dating site OkCupid, the nicer camera might make you look more attractive.
Based on a random “snap decision” survey hosted by the site (two juxtaposed photos with the question, “Who would you rather date?”), people tended to favor photos of people taken with Panasonic Micro-4/3s, followed by Leica point-and-shoots. DSLRs ranked pretty highly as well, followed by big-brand compacts. Certain camera phones like the iPhone ranked as slightly less, though still producing attractive photographs. Minolta DSLRs and the Nikon Coolpix fell below the attractive standard, along with most other camera phones. Kodak really takes it hard, ranking third lowest with the EasyShare next to the Windows and Motorola phones. Read the rest of this entry »
Upside Downy Face is a creative series of portraits by Bruton Stroube Studios in which every subject is hanging upside down but shot right side up. The resulting photographs are priceless:
To see the rest of the portraits in this series, click here.
If you try taking some self-portraits upside down, please link us to the photos in the comments!
There’s some serious artiness going on over at MoMA. Artist Marina Abramović has a new performance called “The Artist is Present” that involves her sitting silently across from museum visitors. The show runs from March 14 to May 31 and, with the exception of a few days, Abramović sits from before the museum opens and continuously through when the museum closes. MoMa also provides a live stream of her performing.
So how does this have anything to do with photography? Photographer Marco Anelli has been creating portraits of the participants for MoMa and uploading them to a MoMA set on Flickr. Below each portrait is also the length of time that person sat in front of Marina. At the time of this writing, there have been 759 fascinating portraits uploaded.
Most people participating sit in front of Abramović for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. One woman sat there for a whopping six and a half hours.
There’s also a good number of people with teary eyes, whether from the stress of sitting and staring, or from being moved emotionally somehow through the performance:
Wikipedia has a description of a previous performance Abramović did with her ex-boyfriend Ulay (who happens to be the man crying above in the upper left hand corner pictured here):
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Hmm…
For more on this performance, check out Jason Kottke’s coverage in which he documents interesting happenings (including an appearance by Lou Reed).
Richard Renaldi has an interesting approach to street photography: he asks complete strangers to touch one another. The resulting interactions are documented in his project Touching Strangers.
Renaldi tells us,
I am a New York city based photographer who began a life long relationship with photography back in high school in 1984. I few years ago I became interested in the dynamics of group portraiture and this led me to the project you see here. The premise of this work is simple: I meet two or more people on the street who are strangers to each other, and to me. I ask them if they will pose for a photograph together with the stipulation that they must touch each other in some manner. Frequently, I instruct or coach the subjects how to touch. Just as often, I let their tentative physical exploration play out before my camera with no interference. Though these situations involve orchestrated collaborations between subject and photographer, the emotions captured are both genuine and honest. Touching Strangers encourages viewers to think about how we relate physically to one another, and to entertain the possibility that there is unlimited potential for new relationships with almost everybody passing by.
To see more of Renaldi’s work, check out his website.
There’s the old adage, it’s not the camera that makes the photographer, but according to a 
Join the PetaPixel Flickr Group
Follow @petapixel on Twitter