You’ve likely seen plenty of images of giant waves from above the surface of the water, but have you ever seen what it’s like to pass under a wave? Photographer Mark Tipple has an amazing project called “The Underwater Project” in which he captures epic photographs of swimmers diving deep in order to survive passing waves, which look like ominous storm clouds rolling overhead. In the interview and behind-the-scenes video above, Tipple shares how he was inspired by a powerful photo by Brian Bielmann, and how he goes about shooting his images.

The Underwater Project (via Fstoppers via Gizmodo)

For those of you who are interested in the business and technology side of things, here’s an interesting 45-minute interview in which Digg founder Kevin Rose chats with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom:

They chat about Systrom’s growing up with computers, his time spent at Stanford, and landing an internship at a startup destined to be worth billions. This ultimately led to launching Instagram which is now 15 million users strong and one of the fastest growing social networks on the planet!

(via Laughing Squid)

Here’s fantastic documentary film about Ansel Adams that PBS made for the history series American Experience.

[...] an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait of this quintessentially American photographer. The documentary weaves together archival footage, photographic images, dramatic readings of the artist’s own writing, and interviews with leading photographers, historians, curators, naturalists, as well as Adams’s family, friends, and colleagues, to tell the story of a man who was at once a visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique, and an ardent crusader for the cause of environmentalism.

It’s about 80 minutes long. You can find out more about the film here.

Ansel Adams: A Documentary Film [PBS]

Here’s an inspiring video in which we hear war photographer Joao Silva discuss the biggest fight of his life: losing his legs to a land mine in Afghanistian and fighting to return to his career. We’ve reported on Silva’s story a number of times before.

(via ISO 1200)

Here are five interesting interview excerpts with renowned street photographers. They’re from Everybody Street, a documentary on NYC street photographers that recently finished raising funds through Kickstarter. The video above features Bruce Gilden.

Ricky Powell

Bruce Davidson

Mary Ellen Mark

Joel Meyerowitz

You can learn more about the film here.

This video was shot by a German film crew in the early 1980s, and shows American street photographer Garry Winogrand at work. Although he died of bladder cancer at age 56, his photographic output during his lifetime was enormous, even compared to other photographers:

Consider this: at his death, Winogrand left behind 2500 undeveloped rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film (mostly Tri-X), 6,500 rolls of film that had been developed but not contact-printed–not to mention 300 apparently untouched, unedited 35mm contact sheets.

Do the math. Conservatively, that’s at least 300,000 pictures – equal to at least two life’s work for anyone else–that Winogrand took but never even saw, so busy he already had been photographing the world around him. [#]

That explains why Winogrand is able to load new film into his Leica so effortlessly while talking to the camera — he could probably do it in his sleep.

(via tokyo camera style)

The Fader has published an interview with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom that reveals how Systrom first got into photography, and how the service’s now-ubiquitous filters came about:

[...] my teacher handed me this plastic Holga camera and said, “You’re going to use this and learn to deal with imperfection.” I remember developing the first roll and the feeling I got from the vignetting and the light leaks that came from the blurry plastic lens. That transformed the way I looked at photography—from trying to replicate reality into taking a scene and creating some kind of interpretation of its mood.

Instagram started as a mobile check-in app, but after creating his first filter (XProII), Systrom realized they could do more with the concept. He then began creating new looks and spending a couple hours at a time trying to mimic the look of different photos.

Oversaturated: Is Instagram’s Popularity Changing Photography? (via A Photo Editor)

Image credit: 2011.02.10 Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom by Gerard’s World

Philip Bloom recently shot this interesting mini-documentary on Anthony Vizzari using a Sony NEX-5N. Vizzari is a guy who collects photographs and cameras, owns a photo shop, and runs a photobooth business. Here’s an artist, architect, antiquarian, photographer, and storyteller, and calls himself an “archotographist”.

A warning: this film contains a few upsetting images. Vizzari collects vintage “mourning” photos in which families gather to make one final photo with the deceased.

Thanks for the tip, Jim!

Here’s the second half of Tamara Lackey‘s recent interview with photographer Chase Jarvis.

[...] Chase gets very real about how he deals with critics, actually taking pride in being disruptive. And, while on the topic of criticism, some thoughts on dealing with the voices in your own head.

We shared the first part last weekend.

Here it is again in case you missed it:

(via ISO 1200)

Tamara Lackey recently sat down with Chase Jarvis to talk about how he became a successful photographer. Chase offers a lot of really good high-level advice for aspiring photographers based on his own experiences — both the successes and the failures.

(via Fstoppers)