Faces Places (Visages Villages) is a wonderful film from Agnès Varda and JR. They’re super-cute, and the cinematography is gorgeous.
Tag: photography
The London Blitz in colour
A selection of colour photos from the London Blitz by the Daily Mail.
Video portrait of Stephen Sasson
David Friedman posted a video portrait of Stephen Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. I mentioned the camera last year, it might be worth revisiting his discussion of its development and the patent file (via df).
The ruins of Detroit
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre photographed the the abandoned and decrepit structures of Detroit.
Having photographed old buildings – “mainly disused theatres” – in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. “It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,” says Meffre, “but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.”
Be sure to visit the gallery as well.
The first digital camera
Steve Sasson created the world’s first digital camera in 1976, while working at Kodak. He discusses the development of the camera in this video.
It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device.
Given Moore’s Law, they estimated that it would take 15 to 20 years before such a camera reached the general consumer. The patent file contains a description and drawings of the apparatus.
Photo tampering history
Hany Farid keeps an archive of photo tampering throughout history. Altering photographs to tell a different story is nothing new, it’s been happening for more than a hundred years. Stalin, Mao and Hitler removed their old friends from photographs too.
Lightroom presets
Presetpond is a community for sharing Lightroom and Aperture presets.
Pursuing the elusive shot
Blood, Sweat and Photographic Tears, the story of a wildlife photographer in pursuit of that rare and fleeting frame. Greg du Toit spent eight months camping out daily at a Kenyan watering hole, enduring parasites and insects, to capture a photo of a wild lion drinking.
Electric photography
Wired has posted a gallery of beautiful electricity photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
For his latest project, called Lightning Fields, the award-winning photographer traded optics for electricity. He wields a Van de Graaff generator to send up to 400,000 volts through film to a metal table. The resulting fractal branching, subtle feathering, and furry whorls call to mind vascular systems, geologic features, and trees.
The last London darkrooms
Last one out, please turn on the light is a survey of London’s remaining professional darkrooms, by Richard Nicholson. The photographs are well lit to reveal the beautiful machinery of an often gloomy place.