Magnum Photos approaches new audiences in deal with Vice magazine - British Journal of Photography

For Magnum, the collaboration with Vice is a positive one, says Bell, as it will allow the agency to showcase the scope and breadth of its offering by including interviews with photographers who are not typical of the Vice brand. "Vice has featured [Magnum] photographers in the past who are perhaps more traditionally suited to their market but we've always wanted do something broader. We hope to feature a range of Magnum photographers - not just those who are working on subjects that are in the news but photographers working on long term projects or those who are outside of the spotlight. It's important that [the series] represents Magnum across the board," he adds. "There are a lot of photographers at Magnum who have work that hasn't been widely seen; I hope we'll have the chance to represent all the different sides of the agency and its membership.

 

Source: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-...

Photoshop illustration of Contra

This is pretty awesome to watch and it's pretty much what I do all day, lol!​

Each frame in this video represents 10 seconds of work. The image spans across 3 PSD files with over 500 layers at a resolution of 9600x5400 pixels. The project took 25 hours to complete over the course of 6 days.

Conscientious Extended | On Process

A good photograph is a good photograph in such a way that the process itself might be an integral part of it, but it’s not the focal point. In other words, the moment you can almost separate out the image from the process - just like you’d think about Hipstamatic as picture plus filter - you’re in trouble: Suddenly, the process itself becomes part of what is being evaluated. But who cares whether it took you three days to make a picture or whether you got that great picture seeing something and then snapping it very quickly?

In photoland, the cult of process is tied to the cult of work. It’s almost as if the more physical and technical effort you put into a photograph, the better it is, or rather: the more we have to admire it. But why would we?

 

This is one of the issues I have all the time.  It's not about the process, it's about the image.  Many times I will get into discussions about the work I do and someone will snarkily ​say, "It's all done in post, the photographer does not matter!" Which is so far from the truth that now-a-days I either get a bit offended or just dismiss the person outright as uneducated. It sounds a bit harsh, but I am over that statement.  The difference between a well composed, beautifully lit, perfectly timed shot and a careless "one off" has huge repercussions for what I can do with it in post. 

Source: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/extended/archi...

Thomas Hawk - Why I Quit Getty Images and Why I’m Moving My Stock Photography Sales to Stocksy

Since the Carlyle Group (read their wikipedia page actually, it’s fascinating) has taken over Getty Images, things seem to have changed. Maybe Getty’s parent is trying to wring as much profit as their stock business as they can, but it feels like artists are getting the short end of the stick even more these days.

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While Stocksy isn’t exactly “occupy” stock photography, rather than me getting 20% and Carlyle getting 80%, I’ll be paid a much fairer 50% payout. The exciting part about Stocksy though isn’t just the higher payout, it’s that the members of Stocksy actually OWN the agency. That’s right, after paying out costs, Stocksy will distribute profits to it’s members — so members will get dividends and actually hold real equity in the business.

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If you are a photographer, consider signing up. One bit of warning here though, Stocksy is being *very* selective about the photographers that they are adding. I have felt a little bad because some of my good friends and talented photographers haven’t been asked to join

 

​And here is more on Stocksy via Cnn.

"Photographers kept coming to see me, coming to visit, telling me how bad the industry was, telling me they were disenfranchised, telling me about the competition, this sea of images. That, combined with declining royalties -- they were super frustrated," he said. "They were looking to me to get back in the game. I just couldn't ignore it anymore."
He's not aiming to conquer the world -- something iStock did as it pioneered the "microstock" market that exploded when an army of digital photographers mobilized to sell photos globally on the Internet. That growth accelerated dramatically when Getty Images acquired iStock for $50 million in 2006. This time around, Livingstone is looking for "sustainability," concentrating on a high-end foothold
Source: http://thomashawk.com/2013/03/why-i-quit-g...

Personal work- Hawaii 2013

Some images from Hawaii this year.  All of these are taken around the town of Paia with the Fuji x100.

Lucas Samaras

For more than a decade, each new Polaroid product prompted Samaras to embark on a fresh suite of experiments. Panorama belongs to a series he began in 1982. For each image the artist made several eight-by-ten-inch Polaroids of a single figure. He then cut each print into strips of equal width and reassembled them to create an elongated hybrid image. This simple technique stretches the figure as a fun-house mirror would, yielding the quality of theatrical fantasy that permeates all of Samaras's work.

LS: I think even at a young age I became aware that two kinds of fame were available: One is the kind you get from building this great church; the other is the kind you get from burning it down.

Zeke Berman

Since the late 1970's Zeke Berman has been making singular, studio-based photographs. These works reflect his long standing interest in visual cognition, optics and the intersection between sculpture, photography and drawing. The formal range of his work, and his sculptural use of materials is varried, original and idiosyncratic. 

Some selected works from Zeke Berman, fine art photographer.​

Shooting High-Resolution Macro Photos of Snowflakes

The manual for the MP-E 65mm lens I use has an aperture conversion chart, which allows me to calculate the “effective aperture at given settings and magnifications. For example, setting the lens to a 5:1 magnification and f/16 will result in an aperture of f/96. At that aperture, diffraction limiting plays a huge role in giving you a blurry image, and your snowflake still wouldn’t be in focus from front to back.

My solution is to slowly move the camera forward and backward through the focus of the snowflake, firing off as many images as possible. I may take up to 200 images of the same crystal, and then choose between 30-40 of them to combine together. Because I’m shooting hand-held, the frames I need are often unevenly spaced and out of order.

Each image is done entirely hand-held. No tripods or focusing rails are used in any of my images. I’m often asked why, and the answer is: necessity. If I took the time to line the subject up perfectly on a tripod, the snowflake will have either melted, blown away or be smothered by other falling snow.

 

Source: http://www.petapixel.com/2013/03/19/shooti...

Gregory Crewdson movie

Brief Encounters Trailer

Big fan of his work, would love to track this down to watch.  Can't belive I just found it today.  I feel like I must have been living under a rock.

Welcome to the New Danklife!

Just wanted to say howdy to anyone swinging by and welcome to the new improved danklife website!  Super stoked to have finally rebuilt it all up from scratch.  Look for more frequent updates in the portfolio as well as blog posts about photography and what have you.​

​Enjoy!​

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Strobist: In-Depth: The New Fujifilm X100s

Essentially, what you have in the X100s is a tiny, super capable camera with fast, sharp glass that handles like a Leica M. The 16MP X-Trans chip is the best APS-sized chip I have seen—in skin tones, high ISO and sharpness. (They changed the distribution of the RGB pixels and lost the low-pass filter without getting moiré.) It is also insanely customizable. And silent.

Again, echoing Zack Arias here when I agree that Fuji is the new Leica. As someone who used many different Leica M film rangefinders, this thing is more Leica M than any digital camera Leica has made yet. By a long shot. And at a small fraction of the cost. If you woulda just used your film M camera with a 35/2 lens permanently on it, as many did, this is your camera.

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The sweet spot with the X100s is to shoot on (L)100 ISO, at 1/1000th of a sec at f/2 with the built-in 3-stop ND filter engaged. That will underexpose full daylight. You can then overpower the sun with a small flash and shoot wide open in the process for gorgeous backgrounds at f/2.

Because of the ND filter, the equivalent exposure for your flash would be as if it were exposing something fully at f/5.6 at ISO 100. Doable, at modest range with a speedlight in an umbrella. And you can own the sun at any aperture with any monobloc. 

 

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Good review of the new Fuji.  I have the older x100 and i love it more then any digital camera I have owned. The new one sounds like a hell of a update.​

Source: http://strobist.blogspot.in/2013/03/in-dep...

L'Oreal Pulled Ads Because They Used Too Much Photoshop

The advertising in question was challenged before NAD by The Procter & Gamble Company, a competing maker of mascaras. P&G took issue with advertisements featuring visuals of model’s lashes and product performance claims related to eyelash length and volume. P&G asserted that the visuals were identical to those that appeared in Canada and the UK, together with a disclosure that stated “Lashes were enhanced in post-production.” NAD is an investigative unit of the advertising industry’s system of self-regulation. It is administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Upon receiving NAD’s initial inquiry, the advertiser advised NAD that it had permanently discontinued all of the challenged print and broadcast advertisements prior to the challenge and affirmed that the in-store advertising would soon be replaced with new advertising.

 

Interesting.  Note how they had to include a disclaimer, “Lashes were enhanced in post-production.” and it was still pulled for false advertising. Oddly enough I am in favor of realism in advertising.

Source: http://www.asrcreviews.org/2013/03/nad-fin...

Photog Uses Crappy Client Photos to Get Hired

Photographer James Hodgins of Sudbury, Ontario has come up with a creative visual solution for a perennial marketing challenge: Convincing clients who think they can shoot their own photography that they will get better results if they hire a professional photographer.

“People are visual. When you start talking lights, they tune you out,” Hodgins says.  One day it dawned on him to invite a client to tag along on a shoot with her own camera. “I said, ‘You take the picture you would have taken, and then I’ll take mine the way I would.”

 

Photographer: James Hodgins

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Oh man, great idea.  May have to use this one with a few of our clients as well.​

Source: http://pdnpulse.com/2013/03/photog-uses-cr...

The Phase One IQ260 Sensor, long exposures return

The result of the short-term project was the Phase One IQ180, based on an 80mp sensor co-developed by Phase One and Dalsa. It raised the 1-min@ISO50 bar set by the Phase One P 65+ to 2-min@ISO35. The improvements were modest, but greatly appreciated by many photographers who found that 1 minute was just at the cusp of what they needed and 2 minutes was enough to placate most of their long exposure needs. But many landscape and architectural photographers needed much longer exposures still, and this would require much more than small tweaks. It would require a complete redesign, an entirely new technology, and close collaboration between the hardware, firmware, and software teams.

 

Source: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/...

Great creative GIF tumblr.

My name is Marinus and I’m a 28-year-old from Dutchland. (sometimes referred to as the Netherlands)
I didn’t know this when I started this blog, but apparently I make GIFs. Most of them are of wildlife and things I find funny or interesting. -Head Like a Orange

Great GIF blog.  Very creative use of GIFs.

iPad Photo Workflow | CreativePro.com

For the traveling photographer—or anyone who shoots in the field—the release of the iPad offered the possibility of a much lighter, easier field kit. Unfortunately, for the first few years of the iPad’s existence, the software did not exist to facilitate a pro-level workflow. Over the last few months, though, a few new apps have hit the store, and they’ve brought some important new post-production capabilities. Depending on your post needs, you might now be able to get away with taking only your camera and an iPad into the field.

 

Source: http://www.creativepro.com/article/ipad-ph...

desretratos - lucas simões

In this series of works I invited intimate friends over to tell me a secret as I took their portrait. However, my intention was not to hear their secret, but to capture the expressions of each one at the moment they revealed their secret. I also asked each one to choose a song for me to listen to in my ear phones while I photographed them. And, after the photo session, I asked each one if the secret had a color, and these are the colors the portraits carry. From this photo shooting session I chose 10 different portraits to cut and overlap. -
10 cut-out photographs and acrylic sheets

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Source: http://www.lucassimoes.com.br/desretratos

Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app

Photoshop has grown and changed over the last two decades, becoming something new and unexpected. That’s great: it means new functionality and (in theory) better performance. But if, like my dad, you’ve been using the app from the beginning, when it was a tiny village that did one thing and did it well, you might be suspicious of all this change. Or at least wonder what it’s good for. Photoshop today seems basically feature complete, and totally unassailable. It’s more than just the best professional image editing app: it’s kind of the only professional image editing app. It’s the city that, to do your job, you have to live in.

 

Source: http://www.danklife.com/blog/?p=2148