Some pretty spectacular images of the human eye.
Close-up HD Photographs of the Human Eye
April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The NYPD Did Not Play Around with Muggers in the ’80s
February 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
USA. New York City. 1980. Subway. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photo
New York City has changed a lot in the past 30 year and nothing helps bring that fact to light like some gritty, intense photography of life in the city during the 80s and early 90s.
Case in point, the guy with the gun in the photo above is an undercover NYPD cop stopping an attempted mugging in progress in what can only be described as the baddest fucking way imaginable.
The photo was taken by Bruce Davidson.
It turns out that this picture has an added layer of complexity. The man holding the gun is actually an undercover police officer. Bruce was helping the NYPD capture muggers in the subway. He figured since he had already been mugged three times, walking around with two undercover cops might not be a bad idea. They needed a decoy and he didn’t mind the company.
Bruce Davidson is considered to be one of America’s most influential documentary photographers. He began taking photographs when he was just the mere age of ten, and carried on his passion right through his studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University School of Design. Later he was drafted into the army and stationed near Paris, where he was able to meet Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of the renowned Magnum Photos Agency. When he left the military in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 he became a full member of Magnum Photos Agency. From 1958 to 1961 he created sensational bodies of work such as “The Dwarf,” Brooklyn Gang,” and “Freedom Rides.”
You can see more of his photos here from a show last year at Aperture Gallery.
Fifth Ave. and 51st St. Manhattan circa 1908
January 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Fifth Avenue hotels north from 51st Street.
Another great, old photograph from early NYC. This one is from the early 20th century. It’s also a great contrast to this photo taken barely more than a decade earlier that shows the slums of New York in the downtown area.
The Slums of 19th Century New York Captured in Photographs by Jacob Riis
January 20, 2012 By 1 Comment
Jacob Riis was a crime reporter in NYC in the late 1800′s and spent much of his time in the seedy parts of old New York. Many of his photographs are also used in a wonderful book called ‘Lowlife‘ (affiliate link) by Luc Sante. Sante does an excellent job of capturing the hardships of living in NYC during the late 19th Century while accentuating his point with this brilliant photographs by Riis.
Sadly, Riis never truly understood the importance of the images he was capturing and always viewed them as superfluous to his main work which was crime reporting.
You can take a look at some more of his photographs in this Daily Mail article but if you’re interested in seeing his a much larger collection of his photographs you can visit the Museum of the City of New York.
The First Ever Photograph of a Human Being
February 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I stumbled across this site via NPR and found a fascinating photo. The site is called The Hokumburg Goombah and had posted this photograph claiming that it’s the first ever photograph taken of a human being.
The photo process is a Daguerreotype and was taken by the inventor of the process, Louis Daguerre, in 1838 in Paris.
The image in a Daguerreotype is formed by the amalgam, or alloy, of mercury and silver. Mercury vapor from a pool of heated mercury is used to develop the plate that consists of a copper plate with a thin coating of silver rolled in contact that has previously been sensitised to light with iodine vapour so as to form silver iodide crystals on the silver surface of the plate. It also requires an extremely long exposure which explains why no other people or carriages appear in the photo. It seems that the man captured must have stayed in one place for a relatively long time, some theorize it looks as if he’s getting his shoes shined.
A commenter on the original post did some fantastic work colorizing the photo which makes some of the details a little more clear.
What makes this story even more interesting is that The Hokumburg Goombah posted this photo in response to a series of Daguerreotypes that NPR posted dating from 1848. The Goombah did his homework and found a human photograph pre-dating those by a decade.
The ironic thing is that the man in the photograph almost surely never new he was being immortalized on film for the very first time in human history and we will likely never know the identity of the very first human being ever photographed.
America in Color from 1939-1943
August 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.*
Wonderful, simply fascinating color photos from early 20th century America. It’s difficult to imagine how different our lives are, and just how fortunate we really are, less than 100 years later.
[*Source: DenverPost.com plog]
How to keep your photos safe like an Enterprise-level organization on a recession proof budget
November 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I have a 19-month-old daughter that I have taken about a million pictures of since she was born. Obviously these photos are very important and extremely valuable to me and something that I hope to someday pass on to my daughter, so it’s my responsibility to make sure to keep them as safe as possible.
Anything that you have that exists only on your hard drive is in constant danger of being lost forever. Is it likely to happen? Perhaps not, but trust me, you don’t want to be the one who finds out the hard way.
I am a photo freak. I, like everyone else who owns any sort of camera, fancies myself an unpolished, amateur photographer. I love taking photos of what’s going on around me. I am constantly amazed at how easy technology has made it to instantly immortalize what is going on in at any given moment in time.
I want to make sure that ever photo I take is safe. I have enough going on in my life that I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not I could suddenly lose every photo I have of my daughter if my hard drive decides to crap the bed.
You don’t have to be a huge corporation to utilize backups and extra storage to keep your photos safe. Here are a few of the tools I use to do it.
Snapture App vs. iPhone Native Camera App
October 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment
It’s good to finally see some of the apps I grew fond of back in the day when I was still jailbreaking my iPhone making their way into the more mainstream App Store. Snapture has a few very cool features that may well make it my camera app of choice, even over the native camera app.
Snapture features
- Tap anywhere to take a photo.
- Can take either one photo or three photos in quick succession.
- Preview thumbnails before saving.
- Take multiple photos even while other photos are processing
My number one favorite feature of Snapture is that you can tap anywhere on the screen to take a photo. Often times the action key to take a photo with the native camera app is awkward to get to, especially if you’re trying to take a photo with one hand.
I have an 18-month-old daughter and I often miss something really cute or funny that she’s doing while I’m waiting for the camera app to reset itself so I can take another photo. Snapture can take three photos and quick succession and while those photos are processing you take more pics. I’ve had up to 15 pics in the queue to be saved, many of those photos are shots I would not have gotten on the native app.
As far as quality goes, the apps are pretty much evenly matched. Snapture seems to have a slightly warmer look than the native camera app but it’s very minor. All in all I would say, if you use your iPhone camera with any regularity, that Snapture is definitely worth the $1.99 it’s going for in the App Store.
Snapture. vs. iPhone Photos
How To: Import photos from your iPhone to your PC in 3 easy steps using Picasa
July 17, 2009 By 8 Comments
If you go searching on the web for the best way to import photos from your iPhone, most likely the answer you’re bound to find is iPhoto. Which is great if you have a Mac, but what about us PC users out there?
Well, as an admitted Google fanboy I have to say that Picasa handles importing photos from your iPhone just as well, if not better than iPhoto.
Once you have your iPhone connected to your computer just follow these three easy steps.
Step 1: Open Picasa and click on the import button
If your iPhone was already connected Picasa will detect that as the correct device to import from.
Step 2: Confirm your device, choose which photos you want to import and execute
Step 3: Enter your info
Enter a folder name and location and description of your photos. Also select what you would like to do with the photos once they’re copied onto your hard drive.
That’s it! Rinse. Repeat whenever you want to grab your photos off your iPhone.
Also, if you’re not familiar with Picasa, it integrates perfectly with Picasa Web and allows you to flip a switch and sync your offline albums to your online Picasa account. No uploading necessary, it’s all done in the background for you.
Email Full-Resolution Photos from Your iPhone
July 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
If you “Copy” photos out of your gallery and then paste them into the body of the email instead of the “Email Photo” button in the Camera app, you can email the full-resolution version of the photo.
In the gallery the first two images are screenshots of ways to copy images from your gallery and the second two images are examples of the resolution you get when you mail a photo and the full-resolution you get when you copy/paste a photo into an email.
Note: There is one caveat to this which can be a little convoluted. It seems that copy/pasting a photo does some sort of mucking around with the exif data. If you save a full-res photo onto your computer the thumbnail orientation is off, 90° CCW. But if you open that same image on your computer it looks fine. However, uploading that to your WordPress site will show the photo as off 90° CCW as well. Thanks to Jon at Geek Stuff I figured out the workaround for this is to open the full-res photo with your image editor and just re-save it. Not the most effecient process in the world (and this may be a non-issue uploading to Flickr or PicasaWeb but it’s definitely an issue with WordPress) but at least it is an option to share your full-res photos with everyone via email.
Google to Archive Over 10 Million Photographs from “LIFE” Magazine
November 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Well-dressed people milling about Union Square and the statue of George Washington atop a horse to celebrate the centennial of his inauguration, the first Congress and/or NYC chosen as first capitol of the US. Circa 1889.
Google is now archiving over 10 million photographs from LIFE magazine. It’s a stunning array of history in many never before seen photographs documenting monumental events and figures in world history on film.
Google LIFE:
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
You can add “source:life” to any Google Image Search (GIS) and search the archives of millions of photos. For example: hiroshima source:life.
LIFE said that as many as 97 percent of the photographs it will make available have never been seen by the public before. Although many of the photographs may have never been seen before that does not mean they will be unrecognizable to you. In fact, quite a few of the photographs are merely slightly different shots, angles or depths of iconic images that our part of our visual history. That, however, does not take away anything from this amazing collection of images.
This is an absolutely fabulous use of technology, I could spend hours searching through these photos.
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