Have you ever wanted to be invisible? That's the question Thomas Hurst, creator of COVR Photo, is asking. COVR Photo is an iPhone case with a sliding prism that, when slid into position, allows the photographer to take photos without being obvious.
One week from today I’ll be on the other side of the world, shooting a personal project that’s been years in the making. On the one hand, I have to be prepared for all kinds of situations. On the other, I can’t bring a suitcase. What do I bring… what do I leave behind… and can I get away with only one shirt?
I'm always fascinated by what makes the best photographers think they way they do. What shapes their ways of seeing? In the current climate of photography, it's easy to get lost in everything technical. We can often lose sight of the most important thing about photography...why we photograph. In this video from Steve McCurry's Youtube channel, we get a glimpse at what goes on in the master mind of perhaps the world's greatest living photographer.
Alison Wright is a tremendous inspiration as a photographer and a human being. In this always fantastic episode of National Geographic Live! we are shown just some of her adventures and a glimpse of her unrelenting fearlessness. After almost being killed in a bus crash in Laos in 2000, she persevered though a recovery process where she was told she would have trouble with mobility and never work as a photographer again. Two years later, she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.
In this fantastic video from National Geographic Live!, documentary photography Chris Rainier talks about his adventures around the world, the myriad cultures he's encountered and the power of photography to translate an emotional response to the art that exists all around us. Rainer began his career as the last assistant to Ansel Adams - a position he doesn't take lightly and one that helpe define is way of seeing.
"All good things must come to an end." It's a common theme throughout this special by National Geographic in which we follow Steve McCurry on his quest of shooting the last roll of Kodak Kodachrome film ever made. It's a pretty daunting and heavy assignment to be sure - one McCurry is no stranger to. That fact is even more apparent when we learn that it was McCurry who asked for the final roll.
Over the last two days, Kiev, Ukraine has seen its worst violence since the Soviet era, with the death toll now at 75. Fighting between police and protesters escalated when protesters used Molotov cocktails and lit several fires in the city square. This video - shot on a drone - shows the epic devastation from above, and I believe this may mark a very significant turning point in photojournalism. Has the public's desire for the theatrical become too large a part of journalism?
Photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols is a National Geographic veteran and one of the best wildlife photographers working today. In this episode of National Geographic Live!, his imagery and stories about Africa's elephants and lions will both break and warm your heart. In his own words, Nichols tells his stories behind the already fantastic magazine stories - ranging from the disgusting aftermath of ivory poachers to the cute and cuddly playfulness of lion cubs
Luke Fontana is a photographer and person based in New York, specializing in celebrity portraiture. After three years in New York, Luke has nothing short of an impressive body of work. He is proof, above all else, that hard work and determination are the key ingredients of success. Having the mind of a comedy writer doesn't hurt either - something you can witness in 120 characters or less here.
Flashpoint’s 14” Fluorescent Dimmable Ring Light ($140) is by no means a perfect product. It’s not the sturdiest of creations; it seems to have about as much metal in it as a pair of sunglasses. It’s bright but not powerful; bright enough to want those sunglasses if you find yourself on the business end. With all that said, this light may be the best value in the lighting market today.
Anyone interested in fashion photography owes it to his or herself to watch this documentary. In the 1960s, three photographers dominated the British fashion scene - David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. "DUFFY: The Man Who Shot the Sixties" is a fantastic film that follows the rise, the (literal) flameout and the comeback of an iconic photographer.
Viewers of "The Walking Dead" are no strangers to Norman Reedus, but few may be aware that Reedus is an accomplished photographer. In this episode of Mark Seliger's "Capture," Reedus joins Al Wertheimer - who you may or may not know as Elvis's personal photographer. It's a great combination of guests - Reedus, known for his dark and almost morbid style (more pictures here) and Wertheimer, known for taking probably the most intimate shots of The King. As always, it's a pretty fascinating episode.
I know it's only a week and a half into the new year, but I'm calling it early. Schwartz Flavour Shots has the most beautiful commercial of the year. Created by DJ MJ Cole with filmmaker Chris Cairns and a brilliant assist from the pyrotechnic wizards 'Machine Shop,' this video is a pretty spicy set of slow motion explosions. Schwartz calls it a 'Sonic Flavourscape.'
It’s no secret that I have an unquenchable, near fetish-like lust for buttons and sliders or anything really that makes image processing akin to playing some freaky, incongruous musical instrument one might find in the Mos Eisley Cantina. This year, at CES 2014, Griffin announced an updated version of their PowerMate - an all-purpose, aluminum knob that will be wireless and wonderful and not out for a few more months. Luckily, there is a pretty great (and relatively inexpensive) wired version available now.
The Reserve Channel is consistently one of the best resources of inspiration and interesting content for creatives. We've featured the Emmy-nominated show Capture on Fstoppers several times. Today we bring you another of the Reserve Channel's shows, the always fantastic ARTST TLK. In this episide, Pharrell Williams sits down with Leonard Nimoy to discuss photography, the character of Spock and what it means to be an artist.
Martin Schoeller is undoubtedly one of the premiere portrait photographers in the world. In this episode of National Geographic Live! Schoeller talks about shooting for National Geographic (including the images found in the most recent issue) as well as several of his other projects. Shooting for the magazine took him to Tanzania where he shot his signature style of portraits as well as some epically beautiful environmental pictures.
Photographer Marcus Bleasdale spent a great deal of time from 2003-2004 covering the exploitation of natural resources in Eastern Congo. Children were either used to mine gold for the rebels that was sold to finance the war or to pick up a weapon and fight as soldiers. Human Rights Watch, with these pictures, pressured the company buying all of this gold ($150 million dollars worth) to stop.
The first automobiles were controlled by something called a tiller (similar to how ships were steered). It was, obviously, not the most practical or efficient means of control. However, in 1894, the first steering wheel was fitted on a four horsepower Panhard for a race from Paris to Rouen. Within ten years, nearly all tillers had been replaced by steering wheels. The mouse, although all-purpose, is the tiller of Lightroom. Ladies and gentlemen, the PFixer by Pusher Labs is the steering wheel we’ve been waiting for.
Engineers Calvin Chu and Ashish Bidadi have created Palette, and it's something to be genuinely excited about. In fact, it may be the best Kickstarter project I've seen in quite a while. Palette is a "freeform hardware interface" that offers a fully customizable set of buttons, knobs and sliders for hands-on control of your software. Yes, please.
For the opening of the new Tate Britain art gallery, Miles Aldridge set out to reimagine the painting 'Merry-Go-Round' by Mark Gertler. The painting was originally created in 1916 while photography was still pretty much in infancy and hardly considered an artistic medium by many. Aldridge's approach was to take elements of the painting and create a series of photographs that hold the true form of the original while still delivering something definitively Miles Aldridge.
Watch this early cut of a potential series about Jimmy Nelson now. Getting past the overly-dramatic-action-movie intro, this is a show you will want to watch. "Before They Pass Away" follows Nelson around the world on his journeys to photograph indigenous tribes before they go extinct. In the first episode, Nelson and his team travel to the Vanuatu Islands where they photograph five different tribes that live on the 83-island chain.
About seven months ago, we posted an article about an application called 'Paddy' that connects a MIDI controller desk to Lightroom. Unfortunately for me, that application is Windows only, so I set out to find a solution for this gadget that I needed in and around my life. The solution is something called 'Knobroom.'
You may already be familiar with Dustin Farrell. If you're not, you should be. His time-lapses are incredible. Dustin's shoots all over the world, but some of his most epic are from the American West. In this video, we get to follow Dustin on location in Utah and the step-by-step process that follows.
It's tough to not love pretty much everything about Mark Seliger's Emmy-nominated show, "Capture." In this episode, Mark sits down with actor Alan Cumming and fashion and portrait photographer Sebastian Kim and they talk about everything from Woody Allen to 'scooter porn' to assembling a photograph like a puzzle.
Cameron Davis is a photographer, cinematographer and creative director based in New York. Growing up in Southern California, Cameron has developed a style that blends East Coast with West Coast, adding in flavors of London and Paris. Focusing primarily on shooting editorial fashion imagery, Cameron's work has been published in treats!, GQ Italia, Fault and S Magazine.
In the competitive landscape of fashion photography, Charles LUCIMA stands out with fashion-editorial images and videos that have graced magazines and televisions around the world. We caught up with Charles after his three-day, Destination MARS workshop and right before shooting a new line of cosmetics.
Kesler Tran is a photographer based out of Los Angeles and New York specializing in fashion, editorial and beauty. Of the three, one will probably find his beauty work resonating the strongest; it teems from every pore of his images. His eye for light and shape, as complex and trained as it is, seems effortless when one browses through the images on his tumblr. With the sheer amount of content, it's also hard to imagine him ever taking a break. Thankfully, he took one for us.
Steve Fischer is a Los Angeles based fashion photographer specializing in shooting women for the fashion, high fashion, lingerie, swimwear and beauty markets. Steve started shooting about 15 years ago, taking a minor hiatus to write and produce television commercials. Not too long ago, he was in a car accident that nearly killed him and left him physically unable to shoot for several years. He returned to his love of fashion photography about four years ago and is here to stay.
FaceResearch.org has published the results of a recent experiment where experimental psychologists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have combined the faces of women around to world to approximate the "average face" of each country. Using a modern version of the technique that Sir Francis Galton pioneered in the 1800's, multiple images of faces are aligned and composited together to form the final result.
In this fantastic little gem of a video, we are able to glimpse at something very few people have had the opportunity to see - images from Helmut Newton's contact sheets accompanied with the stories that go with them. The clip is taken from the documentary "Contacts, Vol. 1" and is one of my favorite videos on Newton. By ignoring any narrative beyond Newton's own words, we are able to witness many subtleties of his character that most documentaries miss.
Photographer and historian Marc Hermann has done a beautiful job pulling historic crime scene photos from the New York Daily News archive to blend them with photographs of the same locations today. For those who live in New York now, it may be easy to forget just how rough the city was in the not-too-distant past.
'Whatever it takes to get the shot.' Carlos Ayesta's "whatever" involves rappelling from skyscrapers to get his unusual perspectives of Paris. In this beautifully shot BTS video by Guillaume Bression, we see Ayesta rappelling from various buildings and peeking into peoples living and workspaces.
"VICE Meets: David LaChapelle" goes inside David LaChapelle's studio in Los Angeles and sits down with him to talk about his early days in New York, what he did in art school and why photography is the parameter that prevents his head from exploding. It's always amazing to get a glimpse into the mind of a great artist and begin to see what makes them tick.
In this episode of the (always) fantastic "Capture," supermodel Helena Christensen and photographic legend Mary Ellen Mark sit down with Mark Seliger and discuss their unique approaches to making their images. Mary Ellen Mark talks about what it was like to photograph Mother Theresa and how every circus in India was more imaginative than the last. Helena Christensen's love of photography began when she hitchhiked around the world as a teenager,
In 2009, Annie Leibovitz was interviewed on PBS's "Conversations." As one of the top portrait photographers in the world, she talks about the beginnings of her career (and how she went to school to become an art teacher), her history with Rolling Stone and what it was like to photograph the Queen of England. She also speaks about how photographing John Lennon hours before his death had a massive impact on her life - and how she's never really gotten over it.
