It’s always fun listening to photographers recount once-in-a-lifetime experiences that lead to once-in-a-lifetime photographs. In this short National Geographic video, photographer Brian Skerry describes what it was like to get up close and personal with a 45-foot-long whale. We only wish there was a little video to go along with his wonderful storytelling!

This is a low budget music video directed by sixtwelve for the song “The Better Man” by Cayetano, and filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II. The story centers around an old Polaroid 636 received as a birthday present.
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Kodachrome film officially died at the end of last year when the last developer — Dwayne’s Photo Service — stopped accepting the film. Before that final nail in the coffin was pounded in, 53-year-old Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Dwayne’s in Kansas to have 1,580 rolls developed. The total cost for the 50,000 slides? $15,798. All of the photographs were of trains.

For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas (via PCMag)

Image credit: Kodachrome by John!!!

In 2007, 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof purchased a box filled with 30,000 negatives from an estate sale for $400. After being stunned by the quality of the street photographs, Maloof began digging and discovered that they were created by a nanny and street photographer named Vivian Maier. He then decided to purchase the other boxes of negatives, bringing his collection of Maier photos up to about 100,000 images. Now some are saying he might have discovered one of the greatest (and previously unknown) street photographers of the 20th century. You can view some of Maier’s photographs here.

Next time you’re at an estate sale, you might want to take a closer look at any boxes of negatives you come across.

Thanks for the tip lebigz!

TIME Magazine’s latest cover features a photograph of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi, with the feature story offering a glimpse into her life since being released from house arrest. The above is an interesting video in which Platon, the photographer behind the photo, tells the harrowing tale of what it took to make the photo. It’s guaranteed to make most portrait assignments sound extremely boring.

You can read the article and view the photographs here.

(via Photoxels)

What’s with underwater photographers getting mugged by large sea creatures these days? Dutch photographer Karin Brussaard was doing ocean photography off the Bahamas recently when a 7-foot-long shark decided to grab her DSLR camera rig and swim off. Luckily, like the other animal thieves we’ve written on in the past, the shark decided to drop the rig a little while later relatively undamaged. What’s even cooler is that they managed the capture the above shot of the klepto shark.

(via Gizmodo)

P.S. Tiger sharks are the second most dangerous shark to humans after the Great White.

Photographer Petra Hall‘s fiancé recently bought a used MG convertible right before going on a vacation. However, on the way back from work the weekend before the vacation was to begin, something in the car exploded and the car went up in flames.

The list of gadgets in the car is enough to make a grown man weep: a Canon 7D, a Canon 24-105L lens, and a MacBook Air. Everything burned up.
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The mystery of the Ansel Adams garage sale negatives keeps taking on new twists, but the latest twist might have solved it once and for all.

KTVU in Oakland is reporting that a Bay Area woman named Mariam l. Walton has come forward with apparently solid proof that the photographs were not taken by Ansel Adams but her Uncle Earl. She was watching KTVU report on the story Tuesday when she suddenly saw a photograph of the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinal Dome and recognized it as a print her uncle Earl Brooks made back in 1923.
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Rick Norsigian, a painter based in Fresno, California, was browsing through a garage sale in 2000 when he came across two small boxes with 65 glass plate negatives. He was able to purchase the photographs for $45 after bargaining them down from $70. Now it turns out he made one of the biggest finds in photographic history.

Experts are now saying that the negatives were created by Ansel Adams between 1919 and the 1930′s — before Adams became famous — and that the photographs could be worth at least $200 million.

The previous owner purchased the plates at a warehouse salvage in Los Angeles prior to selling them to Norsigian.

TIME reports that although experts have concluded that the photos are indeed by Adams, some remain skeptical. Matthew Adams, the grandson of Ansel Adams, is reported as saying,

Mr. Norsigian has been claiming these negatives were made by Ansel Adams for many years. I am unaware of anyone knowledgeable agreeing with him.

Next time you’re at a garage sale or warehouse salvage, give those old looking negatives an extra hard look. You never know what you might find.

(via CNN)

Image credit: Garage Sale by Ben Saren

Here’s a fun story that might convince you to snap all the photos you can of your kids: Alex and Donna Voutsinas were gathering photos in preparation of their wedding when Alex suddenly noticed something in one of Donna’s childhood photographs. The photo, taken 20 years earlier when Donna was 5, showed Alex’s father in the background pushing Alex in a stroller!

After visiting his mother’s house, Alex found photographs from the same day in which he and his father were wearing the same clothes, confirming that they were indeed the people in Donna’s photo.

What’s even crazier is that at the time the photo was taken, Alex and Donna lived in different countries, with Alex living in Montreal and Donna living in Florida. They eventually met each other at work, fell in love, and became another of Cupid’s success stories.

(via Boing Boing)

Image credit: Photograph by Alex and Donna Voutsinas and from WXII