Tag: photography

National Geographic Photo Competition separates good photographers from great…

I know hundreds of good photographers (in the age of Instagram, everybody is “good”), and a handful of truly great photographers. Greatness is about more than having a nice camera and a good eye. There’s something ephemeral about the quality of thought and clarity of vision behind the photos in these entries to the 2011 National Geographic Photography competition.

Some samples…

It makes me a little bit sad at times knowing that while some of my photography might be “good,” it’ll probably never be great.

December 1, 2011

Urban Animals: A photo project that would have been funny before Ohio

I think two weeks is about right… I saw this the day before a pack of wild animals from a crazy man’s crazy zoo wandered crazy town and got shot by some crazy cops. It wasn’t really “funny” then… nor is it now, but these are composite images created from people’s animal photos on Flickr, and one man’s architectural works.

More here.

November 5, 2011

Tumblrweed: Stocking, possibly the new “new planking”…

Stock photography has the capacity to be pretty awful. Mixing random keywords together in the hope that the internet will discover and fall in love with your generic image is a recipe for some pretty awful photo composition.

So stock photography is great fodder for mockery, and thus great fodder for a single serving tumblr. Enter “Stocking is the new planking”…

November 5, 2011

Coming soon to bad sports coverage near you: Ball Cam

We’re not there yet – and this is quite a nifty little concept – but I can see this new technology going bad. Innovative camera work at sporting events is one of my pet peeves. I want to see the action from a good angle, not from on the ground behind the in goal, or on some floating camera hovering at odd points in the stadium. And videos coming from within the ball are obviously the next logical progression now that we have a panoramic ball camera containing 36 lenses.

October 22, 2011

Panorama: Guy takes artsy photos of fry pans

Happiness is a well used fry pan. Amongst other things. These look like planets.

They’re from a little artsy project titled “devour” by a guy named Christopher Jonassen. He included this Sartre quote on the page:

“To eat is to appropriate by destruction”. – Jean-Paul Sartre (French existentialist and writer, 1905-1980)”

October 22, 2011

The (music) disciples: By dress shall all men know…

Photographer James Mollison came up with a pretty fascinating photographic concept here. He set up a photo booth outside concerts from 62 different artists, and snapped shots of the bands’ fans. Turning them into a coffee table book called The Disciples, and providing a little bit of a surface level analysis of different sub cultures. I like it.

Here are some samples.

George Michael

Oasis

Marylin Manson

Morrisey

Via The Atlantic.

October 11, 2011

Tumblrweed: You are not a photographer

I’m not really a photographer. I have a camera and a decent eye – but it takes me about 10 shots of something to be happy with what I’m doing. So I’m kind of a fence sitter here. You Are Not a Photographer takes hideous examples of photography from around the web.

September 13, 2011

Tumblrweed: Mastergram

Mastergram takes properly artistic “masterpiece” photos and treats them with Instagram filters.

So this…

Becomes this…

September 11, 2011

Vintagejs: Lightweight web based photo editor

This is a handy little webapp. If you like your photos to look really old.

It will turn this…

Into this…

It’s quick, simple, and pretty cool.

August 24, 2011

Two lego heads, joined as one…

According to the title, this post could be about stacking up dismembered lego heads to create some sort of Lego Frankenstein, and lets face it, who hasn’t done that…

But no.

My friends Todd and Alyda are super awesome wedding photographers. Award winningly super awesome. And with photos like this, you can see why…

Alyda posted a link to this photo on that Lego Head storage post from the other day. To think I almost didn’t post it.

July 31, 2011

Some more amazing cinemagraphs

Ahh. The humble gif. Why did it take you so long to get classy? You might remember the post about cinemagraphs from a month ago. Or so. It was amazing. Here are some more.


From here


From here (same guy as above, there’s a series)


From here

Here are some not so nice gifs. In a gif museum. To remind you why you hated the Internet when it was full of them. And some nicer not nice gifs. As in they use the medium well, but not as well as the above.

These were all poached from this great feature about the art of the gif on dashes.com, and I commend it to you.

July 30, 2011

Monkey see, Monkey shoot

It turns out it’s less dangerous (as you’d expect) for a monkey to get hold of a camera, where they’ll take delightful self portraits…

… than it is for a monkey to get hold of a machine gun.

July 22, 2011

Photographic Rube Goldberg Machine takes the art of portrait photography to new level

Impressive. I love a good Rube Goldberg Machine.

July 20, 2011

What a week…

I feel like I owe you all an apology. But there’s a blog out there that collects lame apologies from people for not posting on their blogs… and I want no part of that. I’ll find the link soon. I promise.

Here’s a snapshot of my last eight days. Well. A series of snapshots. We spent the week in Townsville where I was consulting for the company consulting for the V8 race that was held up there over the weekend.

Here’s the media centre I sat in for four days.

Fun week. Townsville still feels a bit like home. And I do love working in PR. But it was back to college today. Five subjects this semester. Hopefully there’ll still be time for this little ol’ blog.

July 12, 2011

Introducing the Cinemagraph: Like GIFs, but classy

These are great. I’d never thought about the artistic possibility of the GIF. I just thought they were for people hurting themselves in humourous ways. But no. They can do so much more.

Here’s a guide to making your own Cinemagraphs. Pretty clever.

June 8, 2011