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Behind The Scene Of Cosplay Photography

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Behind The Scene Of Cosplay Photography

Read more: http://www.ifunny.com/

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9 Photography Tricks Advertisers Use to Make Food Look More Delicious

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9 Photography Tricks Advertisers Use to Make Food Look More Delicious

Photographing food in a studio creates unique challenges. The bright studio lights and lengthy setup times for the perfect shot means food sits around longer than usual.

That’s why many commercial photo shoots include ‘food stylists’ that use tricks and hacks to make the food last longer (e.g., not melt) and appear even more delicious than real life.

Read more: http://twistedsifter.com/

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Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art review an experimental masterclass

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Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art review an experimental masterclass

This epic exhibition shows how masters from Man Ray and Mondrian to Maya Rochat transformed reality in their laboratory-like darkrooms and studios

In 1916, when Alvin Langdon Coburn met fellow American Ezra Pound in London, he was already a celebrated photographer, having made his name with striking monochrome portraits of leading literary and artistic figures such as Rodin, WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. It was Pound who introduced him to vorticism, the short-lived British avant garde modernist movement created by artist and writer Wyndham Lewis as a reaction to the dominance of landscape and figurative art. Equally frustrated by the representative nature of photography, Langdon Coburn immediately sensed the liberating potential of the vorticist dynamic of geometric shapes and cubist fragmentation.

In the Shape of Light, Langdon Coburns vortographs, blurred geometric arrangements of light and shadow, made using a set of mirrors to fragment the subject in an almost kaleidoscopic way, set the tone for an epic exhibition that traces the history of photography as experiment. Here, portraiture, landscape and documentary give way to abstractions created either by manipulations of light and chemicals or by distorting or fragmenting the actual world. The result is a kind of mirror-history of the mediums relationship to documentary and abstract art.

Photogram c1925 by Lszl Moholy-Nagy. Photograph: Jack Kirkland Collection, Nottingham

Spread over 12 rooms, Shape of Light is also a history of innovation, in which the darkroom and the studio are more akin to the laboratory. The early-to-mid-century masters of light and form are all present: Brassa, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, their embrace of abstraction a kind of compliment to their more traditional documentary work. Their often stark monochrome photographs are contrasted with the formalist paintings of Braque and Kandinsky as well as the shiny curves of a gold Brancusi sculpture, Maiastra (1911), which Steichen must surely have been aware of when he made his oddly mystical study, Bird in Space, 15 years later. It is instructive, too, to see an image from Germaine Krulls still-undervalued series Mtal (1928), a hymn to the angularity and materiality of steel, and to contrast it with the cleaner lines of Margaret Bourke-Whites ground-level view of the NBC Transmission Tower (1934).

In a room entitled New Vision, the work of the great self-taught Hungarian modernist, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, inevitably dominates. His painting K VII (1922), a minimalist arrangement of lines and blocks of colour, is echoed in an untitled photograph by him from the same year and, much later, in Mondrians supremely ordered arrangement of colour and form, Composition C (No 111) With Red, Yellow, Blue from 1935. Similarly in the following two rooms, the restlessly innovative imagination of Man Ray makes its presence felt. One of his mysterious rayographs from 1922 is an early example of camera-less photography made by placing everyday objects directly on to photosensitised paper and exposing them to light.

A restlessly innovative imagination makes its presence felt Anatomies, 1930, by Man Ray. Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Both artists cast a long shadow: Moholy-Nagy in his architectural understanding of scale, angle and detail, and his subversion of the same; Man Ray in his seemingly instinctive grasp of photography as an essentially surrealist medium, capable of bending the real out of shape in astonishing ways. Bafflingly, though, there is not a trace of one of photographys great female pioneers, Berenice Abbott, who made formally brilliant architectural photographs of modernist New York as well as pioneering scientific images of great beauty including what she called her rayograms-in-motion that surely deserved inclusion here.

In a show that tends towards the cerebral, it is a relief to encounter some more tactile nudes by Brassa and Imogen Cunningham, in which the curves and surfaces of the female body retain a palpable sensuality. Bill Brandts distorted female forms, though, seem a little too forced in comparison. All three of the aforementioned artists could have featured in room eight, which is titled Surface and Texture. It begins with three images from Brassas Graffiti series, in which he photographed anonymous carvings and etchings made on the walls of Paris, some recognisably representational, some abstract, all seeming to hark back to older forms of expression such as cave drawings. More intriguing still are Aaron Siskinds photographs of cracked, peeling paint on weathered surfaces, which possess a tangible sense of materiality and a tonal quality that speaks of time passing and, with it, the slow, inexorable decay of buildings, objects and those who created them.

This is an exhibition that demands a constant attentiveness to detail and, as such, will repay a second or even third visit. The sheer amount of work on display is at times overwhelming and here and there the endless riffs on angular shapes, circles and patterns of light began to blur into a long series of slight variations on a single brilliant idea. In this context, Lewis Baltzs almost blank minimalism is a much-needed breathing space. His evocation of the banality of postwar suburban American architecture grey concrete surfaces in small frames has a social, even political, undertow in that it draws attention in its deadpan way to the spread of these soulless environments. This is the mundane made abstract.

A Rock is a River (Meta River) by Maya Rochat, showing at Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art. Photograph: Maya Rochat

The final room is given over to contemporary abstraction and, perhaps inevitably, reflects the dilemma of current photographic practice in our profligate image culture. Both Maya Rochat and Daisuke Yokota, in their differing ways, subject their images to intense, almost destructive, transformative techniques using chemicals, heat, paint and, in Daisukes case, constant rephotographing, reprinting and rescanning. The visceral nature of their approach both degrades and heightens the photographic image and, by extension, the very idea of photography as a recording medium. The end results are images that are, among other things, traces of a process that is akin to improvisational music insofar as it allows, even thrives on, spontaneity and accident.

London-based Antony Cairns produces traces of a different kind, his shadow-images of London at night emanating an almost ghostly atmosphere that is both Ballardian and oddly Victorian. His silver gelatin prints are shown here behind glass plates in a large grid, each one a glimpse of a cityscape, indistinct yet recognisable, familiar yet unknowable. The ghosts of photographys past haunt these images: the monochrome textures and shadowlands of Strand, Stieglitz, Steichen and Brassa the flaneurs and psychogeographers of another time who sensed the mediums singular possibilities, not just to reflect the real, but to transform it into another kind of abstract art.

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art is at Tate Modern, Londonfrom 2 May to 14 October.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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These 23 Images Take Engagement Photography To The Next Level

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These 23 Images Take Engagement Photography To The Next Level

Think all engagement photos are painfully awkward and cheesy beyond belief? Think again.

Seth and Kaiti Photography

On Tuesday, Junebug Weddings announced the winners of their 2018 “Best of the Best Engagement Photography” contest, and the images are a cut above the rest. A panel of judges, along with the Junebug team, sifted through nearly 6,000 images from all around the world, but only 50 photos made it into the final collection.

See 23 of our favorite pictures below. You can view the collection in its entirety on the Junebug Weddings website.

1

Ale Bigliazzi Photography

2

Hafenliebe Wedding Photography

3

Tinted Photography

4

Mathias Fast Photography

5

Motiejus

6

Will Khoury Photography

7

Lukas Korynta Photography

8

Tom Armstrong

9

Ken Pak Photography

10

Terralogical

11

Seth and Kaiti Photography

12

Brandi Potter

13

Lukas Piatek

14

Erin Northcutt

15

Renata Xavier Photography

16

Bows and Lavender

17

Wandering Woo Photography

18

The Ferros

19

Autumn Nicole Photography

20

Juddric Photography

21

Naman Verma Photography

22

Daniel Lopez Perez

23

Sara Rogers Photography

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

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Women battling sexism in photography a picture essay

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Women battling sexism in photography a picture essay

From equipment designed by men for men to clients assuming theyre the makeup artist, female photographers are still fighting against the tide

Push-ups and photography arent normal bed partners. But when Cybele Malinowski was starting out as a young photography assistant in 2005, she was told to do 100 push-ups a day. The reason? To match the strength of a man.

Its extremely physically demanding work, recalls Sydney-based Malinowski, now 37. Camera and lighting equipment has historically been designed by men for men.

As her career gathered pace, Malinowski battled discrimination beyond heavy gear. Often when she arrived on set, the client would assume that her male assistant was the photographer, or that she was the makeup artist or stylist. More recently, when she became pregnant, Malinowski suddenly found herself losing jobs: clients told her they feared she just wasnt up to it.

Grumble and Moan Winter by Liz Ham.

Today the majority of students in undergraduate and graduate photojournalism programs are women. Yet between 2012 and 2017, women made up just 15% of entries to the World Press Photo awards, according to the New York Times. A survey of major talent agency websites in Australia and their roster reveals that under 25% of agency-represented photographers are female.

This affects what we see on our front pages and billboards. In the US, as revealed in a TEDx talk by the celebrated photographer Jill Greenberg, 92% of adverts are shot by men, as are 85% of magazine covers. (This despite the fact that 85% of consumer purchases are made by women). Anecdotal evidence in Australia, where statistics are harder to find, suggests similar ratios. As Nadiya Nacorda once said: Sexism does not stop at the photo industrys doorstep. It comes inside, and goes in your fridge, cracks open a beer and sits on the couch.

L-R Briana and Kabrina by Yasmin Suteja and Spirit by Bec Lorrimer.

Trying to get sexism off the couch has become Malinowskis mission. Last year she co-founded Agender, a platform for female photographers designed to exchange ideas and advance careers, with the former investment banker turned entrepreneur Angela Liang. Their second annual exhibition, Balance for Better, will open on 9 March to mark International Womens Day, with 50% of sale profits donated to Sydney Womens Fund.

This exhibition, on the one hand, is held to celebrate women and its also trying to put a mirror up on the industry itself: [to say] look at these incredible women, why are they still a minority? says Malinowski.

Wild + Free by Elise Hassey.

We want to show future female photographers: yes, of course, you can do it. If youre hungry, youre talented, youre driven, you can definitely get there.

In Balance for Better, 22 female photographshave created responses to the question of what makes up the female gaze. Images include Malinowskis Big Sur, Little Her, in which a naked woman with red hair is dwarfed by a sparse coastal landscape; Liz Hams Grumble and Moan Winter, showing a woman and girl swimming underwater; andYasmin Sutejas soulful portraits of African-American skaters in New York.

L-R: Big Sur, Little Her by Cybele Malinowski, Wompoo Pigeon by Leila Jeffreys.

Being a female photographer can be an advantage in certain situations. For example, gaining access to, and the trust of, children or women in conservative countries in the Middle East. But this also has a flipside. The documentary photographer and artist Anna Maria Antoinette DAddario, who shoots for publications ranging from the New York Times to the Guardian and whose work is shown in Balance for Better, was recently at a holy festival in Vrindavan, northern India, where she found herself stuck in traffic. I had my head yanked back aggressively by men wanting to paint my face I witnessed foreign women on the streets being openly groped, she says.

Daniel Web by Michele Aboud.

The temple was renowned for being packed full of male devotees and based on my experience during the day I knew that if I went there I would be putting myself in a volatile situation, continues DAddario. The shots I wanted to get were not vital to my story so I returned home but I was frustrated and a little angry, as it was the first time I had felt that my being a woman had limited my freedom and safety in a place I wanted to work.

DAddario experienced a physical threat to her safety. Her fears were not unwarranted: women killed on the job in recent years include the German photographer Anja Niedringhaus, who was shot dead in Afghanistan in 2014, and the French photographer, Camille Lepage, murdered in the Central African Republic at the age of 26 the same year.

However, Agenders Liang believes that a far more insidious, and unreported, problem is unconscious bias. Many creative directors and producers will simply go back to the same photographers theyve already worked with time and time again, who are more often than not male, she explains. Stereotypes often dictate that women should stick to what they know: weddings, beauty, children, families.

Not helping are learned gender differences instilled at infancy. While men are taught from childhood to be bold and assertive, women are taught to be apologetic. Liang notes: Women are more susceptible to imposter syndrome [they are] less confident about approaching or pitching if they dont feel they are 100% qualified.

Malinowski, for one, believes that female photography is critical to leading a shift away from the male gaze, creating a whole new visual language and in turn visual identity for women (and men). It is desperately needed: as Jill Greenberg put it bluntly in her TEDx talk, nearly every image we are surrounded by has been filtered through a mans eye.

Daniela Federici by Amanda Beard.

In Balance for Better, one photograph, shot specifically for the show, stands out. The sculptural We Are Women by Cara ODowd shows women some young, some old, all naked except for their underpants painted different shades of pink. We are women. This is what we are saying, insists Malinowski of the work. Here we are. Look at us.

Agenders second annual exhibition, Balance for Better, is showing at Sun Studios, Sydney, from 931 March

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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So My Photography Project Was Where Do You See...

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So My Photography Project Was Where Do You See...

Read more: http://www.ifunny.com/

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The 2019 Wellcome photography prize: close focus on the human condition

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The 2019 Wellcome photography prize: close focus on the human condition

The annual awards celebrate the best images of science around the world

A human face lies inert on a surgical tray as if staring up at the team of doctors hovering over it. It has taken them 16 hours of precise, painstaking work to remove it from a 31-year-old female donor, who had died three days earlier. A few seconds after photographer Lynn Johnson captured this extraordinary moment, plastic surgeons in the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, began the second phase of a procedure that lasted around 30 hours in total. When it was completed, 21 year-old Katie Stubblefield became the youngest person to receive a successful full face transplant.

Taken in 2017 as part of a bigger series documenting Stubblefields groundbreaking surgical transformation, Katies New Face (2017) is one of several arresting images that have made the shortlist for the 2019 Wellcome Photography prize. The aim of the award is to celebrate compelling imagery that captures stories of health, medicine and science. Composed of four categories Social Perspectives, Hidden Worlds, Medicine in Focus and Outbreaks the shortlist perhaps predictably favours documentary and photojournalism. There are some surprises, though, not least the often beautiful abstractions of David Linsteads microscopic image of the capillaries of a human fingertip that had been injected with red ink.

Katies New Face, 2017, Lynn Johnson.

At the age of 21, Katie became the youngest person ever to receive a full- face transplant. This was the critical moment after the donors face was surgically removed before being transferred onto Katie. There was complete silence in the room as the surgical team absorbed the gravity of their mission. The transformational procedure took over 30 hours and was undertaken by a team of around 30 medical professionals at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

From its inception, photography has been utilised to illuminate the mysteries of science and medicine, with Victorian pioneers such as Henry Fox Talbot and Auguste Adolphe Bertsch creating microscopic studies of insects and plants that often resembled ornate line drawings. As the category Hidden Worlds shows, that tradition of cutting-edge experimentation continues apace with an advanced image-mapping of HIV infection undertaken by a team of research scientists that allows us to see four representations of the same cluster of 100,000 cells from a rhesus monkey.

Shroud, Rhne Glacier, 2018, Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann

In the Rhne glacier in the Swiss Alps, a family runs an ice grotto as a popular tourist attraction. But, as the Earth warms, the glacier is shrinking and the grotto is under threat an unusual example of how climate change imperils peoples livelihoods. In response, the family has covered part of the glacier with white geosynthetic blankets to reflect away the suns heat and keep the cold in. This slows the shrinkage, but it is only a small-scale, temporary fix.

In the same section, Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymanns man-altered landscape Shroud, Rhne Glacier, shows the range of approaches and the breadth of subject matter that the prize celebrates. It could be mistaken at first glance for a signature work by the conceptual land artist Christo, famous for his wrapping of monumental buildings and stretches of landscape in fabric. It is, in fact, an attempt by environmentalists to slow down the melting of the Swiss glacier, the heavy thermal material reflecting heat and light that would otherwise destroy the ice. It is an image of an undertaking that seems both surreal and slightly desperate, but the ecological context is calamitous: the Rhne Glacier has lost 350 metres (1,150ft) in ice thickness since 1856 and around 40 metres in the last decade alone.

Zora the Robot Care-Giver, 2018, Dmitry Kostyukov This woman in a nursing facility outside Paris has developed an emotional attachment to Zora the robot. There are at least 15 of these robots currently in use in healthcare settings in France, and more around the world, including Australia, the US and elsewhere in Europe. Controlled remotely by a nurse, Zora can help people with communication and provide comfort and entertainment (including exercise classes). Some people respond very positively to interacting with Zora, others ignore it completely.

Sex and death inevitably feature and, again, it is in the Hidden Worlds category where the contrast is most dramatic. Simone Cerios wonderfully tender and intimate series, Love Givers, is represented by a single understated image of two semi-naked women lying on a bed. Shot from above, it suggests the casual intimacy of longterm lovers, but one of them, Debora, is the first officially sanctioned sexual assistant in Italy, whose role is to support disabled people to explore intimate practices.

Love Givers, 2013, Simone Cerio

Debora is the first sexual assistant in Italy supporting disabled people (male and female) to explore intimate practices. Repression of sexual instincts can cause psychological stress, and this can particularly affect those who are not able to use their bodies fully. By providing physical contact of the right kind in a safe environment, a trained professional can improve a persons wellbeing, increase self-esteem, and prepare them for future intimate relationships.

Cerio has described her project as a physical and mental journey that challenges our perception of the disabled and their most intimate needs. Sexual assistance is a technique of psychophysical approach to disabled people, based on massages, kisses, visual contacts and erotic stimulation, she elaborates on her Facebook page, This project is an opportunity, perhaps the only way for disabled people to have such an experience.

The Morgue, 2017 Luis Henry Agudelo Cano

In a country with high rates of violent crime, many young people in Colombia choose to study forensic sciences or embalming. They seek to discover the identities of the many unknown bodies that arrive at the morgue in the hope that they can then be returned to their families. This busy university teaching morgue in Medellin also doubles as the judicial morgue when the civil service is on strike.

Luis Henry Agudelo Cano has already won second place in the current affairs and news category of the 2018 Sony world photography awards for his black and white series Young People Who Beautify Death. The single image from it included here gives you a sense of its almost ghostly intimacy. Entitled The Morgue, and shot in Colombia in 2017, it is a multiple exposure of one of the young people who are trained to, as Cano puts it, salvage the beauty of the deceased, that those who love them can always remember them. Like his fellow students, this young man is being trained in postmortem techniques to erase the scars and wounds of violent death so that the victims of Colombias prolonged paramilitary-fuelled violence can be viewed by their relatives.

Among the several captured moments of intimacy on display in the shortlist, perhaps the strangest is by Dmitry Kostyukov. His portrait of an elderly resident of a nursery facility near Paris is tenderly observed, but it challenges all our received notions of what constitutes care and, indeed, tenderness. The woman is cradling Zora, a robot remotely controlled by a nurse as an aid to communication, comfort and entertainment of the residents. Many of them ignore Zora, while others take her to their hearts as they would a child.

Mapping SHIV infection in the body, 2018, by Carly Ziegler, Alex Shalek, Shaina Carrol, Leslie Kean, Victor Tkachev and Lucrezia Colonna.

Visualising complex genomic data is hard. In this image, each of the four coloured circles shows the same roughly 100,000 cells from rhesus macaques, with genetically and phenotypically similar cells clustered together. Every dot represents a single cell and the lines connecting them reflect how similar they are. In the bottom right circle, red cells are from monkeys infected with simian- human immunodeficiency virus while blue cells are from uninfected ones. Distinguishing the red and blue cells helps to show which cells change and malfunction during infection, despite treatment with antiretroviral drugs.

Like many of the images that have made it on to the shortlist, Zora the robot care-giver is a glimpse of a future in which new technologies such as advanced robotics and artificial intelligence will inform our lives in ways that, until recently, we would have scarcely imagined outside of the realm of science fiction. It is these glimpses of a future that is already here that makes the selection so compelling. That, and the evidence of the deep humanity that still underlies so much of the work done by those at the forefront of advances in health, medicine and science.

All the winning and shortlisted entries will go on show at the Lethaby Gallery, London, 4-13 July. Category prizes and the overall winner will be announced at aceremony in London on 3 July 2019

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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Artist Uses UV Photography Techniques To Reveal Raw Portraits Of People That We Dont Normally See (10 Pics)

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Artist Uses UV Photography Techniques To Reveal Raw Portraits Of People That We Dont Normally See (10 Pics)

Pierre-Louis Ferrer picked up photography back in 2006 whilst studying electronic engineering and optical sensors. “In 2012, I began to learn about infrared photography, a niche technique that allowed me to extend the spectrum of my photographs to a world invisible to the naked eye. I am experimenting a lot with this poorly documented technique. I offer an alternative vision of my environment, borrowed from fantasy and mystery,” says the photographer.

Ever since then, he has been working on UV shooting techniques that could be applied to people to reveal the impact of the environment left on their skins. And since three years ago, Ferrer has been dedicating himself completely to his own photography projects, having quit his job as an engineer.

Clémence

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

The author comments that BRUT (RAW) is a photography project comprising of twenty photographs divided into ten diptychs (a painting or carving on two panels hinged like a book). The main goal of the series is to illustrate the raw character of the human being, made possible by the technique of ultraviolet photography.

Rémi

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Lucien

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Each entry of the series consists of two sides. One is meant to show a portrait of a human being devoid of any ornaments, and the other – a more abstract complement – a close-up detail of their bodies.

Estelle

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Vincent

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

”Here, no place is given to the alteration of reality. The photographs break the barriers of the skin to reveal the true appearance of each subject, immutable and unfalsifiable. The result is a succession of portraits where sensitivity prevails over plastic beauty, questioning the notion of real and perceived image.”

Manon

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Rudgy

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Each model delivers an intimate view of themselves to the viewer – something they can not perceive themselves. This relationship of intimacy and trust stands in stark contrast to our society.

Chloé

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Amira

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

If you wish to acquire a copy of a photograph, here are some things to bear in mind. Each photograph in this series is limited to 12 copies only. Each print is signed, numbered and certified by the artist. Each diptych is inseparable: the corresponding work takes the form of two art prints integrated into a black double window mat and framed by a black aluminum frame. Each of the two prints composing a diptych is printed in 49x35cm for a total frame of 90x60cm. For more info, visit photographer’s website linked above.

Olivier

Image credits: Pierre-Louis Ferrer

Read more: http://www.boredpanda.com/

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Space Photos of the Week: New Horizons Breaks a Record for Long-Distance Photography

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Space Photos of the Week: New Horizons Breaks a Record for Long-Distance Photography

This week we’ll travel all over the cosmos, out from galaxies to Jupiter and Mars. But for now we’re going to hang out in in the outer edges of our solar system with the spacecraft New Horizons. This intrepid explorer has already broken a record by being the first craft to visit Pluto, the dwarf planet marked with a huge heart on its surface.

As if that wasn’t enough, the spacecraft is venturing even further out to fly by another object called 2014 MU69, a small rocky body known as a classical Kuiper Belt object. These icy rocks lurk on the outer edges of the solar system, a sort of time capsule of its early days. Many objects in the Kuiper Belt (a loose collection of asteroid- to dwarf planet-sized objects that are made up of ice and rock) are still orbiting close to where they formed. By studying these objects, scientists pick up clues about what those early days were like—and gives them ideas about what solar system formation looks like outside of our own.

Right now New Horizons is hurling through those outer edges of space en route to MU69. But while on the journey, it took a photo of a galactic star cluster called Wishing Well. Before this image, the famous Pale Blue Dot photo taken by the Voyager spacecraft on Valentines Day 1990, held the record for farthest image ever made by humankind. Voyager was 3.75 billion miles away when it turned towards Earth to take our portrait. As of this week, New Horizons and its team will take the distance lead, having taken its image 3.79 billion miles from Earth. And they’re not done yet: On January 1, 2019 New Horizons will arrive at MU69, making it the farthest object in space humans have ever visited.

Still want to hang out in zero g’s? Check out the full space collection here.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/

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Early Entries For The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019 Are Off To A Hilarious Start

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Early Entries For The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019 Are Off To A Hilarious Start

Mother Nature is not always poised and elegant, sometimes she is downright nutty and nonsensical. The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards is back for 2019 and off to a loony start.

The competition was co-founded by photographers Tom Sullam and Paul Joynson-Hicks MBE, who wanted to foster an appreciation for the absurd, lighter side of wildlife. Despite the humorous theme, their mission is to promote conservation through positive imagery. To do this, they’ve partnered with The Born Free Foundation, a wildlife charity that aims to keep animals in wild places and treat them with compassion.

Together, they hope to share three main conservation messages. The first is to shop responsibly by looking at the ingredients in products (ie palm oil). The second is to use less water at home: “Ok, this is the thing, each time you flush the loo we send approx. 20 liters of water down the drain – seriously, it’s crazy. So ‘If it’ s yellow, let it mellow’… you know the rest…! Have shorter showers, water your garden a little less.” The third is to become a “wild influencer” by encouraging friends and family to do the simple things that make a different, vote, and to talk about conservation on social media.  

The competition, now in its fifth year, is open to the public and free to enter until June 30, 2019. Without further ado, here is a selection of some of the best images the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019 have received so far.

On Guard. Hasan Baglar/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Despite all appearances, this is not ottercide. Andy Harris/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Take a picture of me! Bob Riach/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Not. Here. Mike Rowe. Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Pee-ew! Isabelle Marozzo/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Look, I’m the Yeti. Roie Galitz/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

Classic fart joke. Eric Keller/Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2019

To view more, check out 2018’s winning images here, 2017’s batch of absurdities, and 2016’s giggly wonders.

    Read more: http://www.iflscience.com

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This Artist Turns Aerial Photography Into Prints That'll Last Forever

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This Artist Turns Aerial Photography Into Prints That'll Last Forever

From a certain vantage point, you can't quite tell what hangs on the back wall of Justin Brice Guariglia’s Brooklyn studio. At a distance, the 16-foot print looks like a textured painting with jagged edges you can reach out and touch. Upon closer inspection, you realize the image is flat, like a photo. In reality, the trompe l'oeil lies somewhere between the two. “They’re paintings derived from photographs,” says Guariglia.

This painting, in particular, comes from Guariglia's recent flight with NASA's Operation IceBridge mission. It's a shot of the Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland’s largest and fastest melting hunk of ice, part of a series of landscape prints Guariglia made for his Earth Works: Mapping The Anthropocene, his show opening at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida, on September 5.

Justin Brice Guariglia

Guariglia, who got his start as a freelance magazine photographer in Asia, made the switch to fine art a decade ago. Photos printed in a magazine are inevitably thrown away; he wanted to create art that lasts forever. For this show, Guariglia figured out how to print his aerial photographs onto aluminum and polystyrene canvases. “The physical object in the photo is already gone,” he says. “But the actual image will last forever—as long as we don’t recycle it.”

The images, taken at altitudes of 1,500 to 40,000 feet, turn Asian countryside and arctic landmasses into abstract forms. Guariglia transforms farmland into gilded geometries and glaciers into ambiguous vistas of white. Many of the photos in the show came from the IceBridge mission, which flies low-elevation planes over Greenland to gather data on the country’s rapidly deteriorating glaciers. During the flights, Guariglia would lay prone at the feet of the pilots, snapping photos of the ever-changing landscape from the plane’s drop windows.

Guariglia doesn't do much tinkering back in the studio. "I mostly just trying to reduce the image to its most basic essential form," he says. He uses an industrial grade printer to map the images onto polystyrene and gold-leafed aluminum. The printer, handmade in Switzerland and roughly the cost of a “very nice” Brooklyn apartment, serves as the artist's paintbrush. It dispenses a fine layer of acrylic ink onto the surface before ultraviolet lights bind it to the material.

The printer, he says, typically is used for imaging high-end signage. “I make it do things it’s not supposed to do,” he says, like printing on polystyrene or laying down 150 layers of ink at 900 percent saturation. “I’ve logged about 1,500 hours testing material and printing processes.” The end result is a photographic print that effectively lasts forever, despite the ephemerality of the subject matter.

Guariglia's process, subject matter, and material choice are all meant to represent the anthropocene, the current geological age defined by humanity's impact on the environment. The goal, as he explains it, is to implicate not just himself as an artist using the material (which will become part of the fossil record in the anthropocene age) but anyone who looks at it. The prints remind viewers that the issues humans face, due mostly to our own actions, are enormous. But captured, cropped, and printed onto rectangular panels, they're at least easier to see.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/

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Audubon Photography Awards Release The Best Entries Of Birds Chowing Down And They're Hilarious

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Audubon Photography Awards Release The Best Entries Of Birds Chowing Down And They're Hilarious

In the latest release of the Audubon Society’s bird-nerd photos, we’re given a glimpse into the predatory realm of our flying, feathery friends and let’s just say we have never been more happy to be at the top of the food chain. 

The photos were released as part of the nonprofit conservation organization’s annual photography competition, and even though these images didn’t necessarily take home the grand prize, they remind us just how eclectic and unique the avian world truly is. As Audubon notes, birds need to eat a lot in order to survive – we can only imagine how tiring flying around can be. For many species, that means fueling up requires eating as much as one-third of their body weight every day. Dainty little hummingbirds might eat up to 100 percent of their body weight in nectar alone, while the medium-sized Cooper’s Hawk eats around 12 percent of its weight each day. For a human weighing around 68 kilograms (150 pounds), that’s the equivalent to 8 kilograms (18 pounds) of grub, about 48 cheeseburgers. 

Not to mention, the diet of our avian amigos is quite the nature-inspired buffet. In 2018, photographers from around the world captured birds eating everything from fish to frogs and lizards to starfish – even other birds (oops). 

So, grab your lunch and take a few minutes to yourself to admire the wonderful world of predatory birds. Though you may lose your appetite and there may be terrible puns (you are warned), we promise it’ll be worth it. 

I regret nothing…

Herring gull. Photo: Christi Herman/Audubon Photography Awards

It’s tough being an owl by oneself. We’re sure that’s why this northern pygmy owl below was captured toting around their little rodent friend, right? 

Northern pygmy owl. Pierre Cenerelli/Audubon Photography Awards

Speaking of little buddies, this majestic peregrine falcon was also spotted palling around with its buddy, the common grackle. Hawkward…

Peregrine falcon and Common Grackle. Scott Dere/Audubon Photography Awards

 No (r)egrets about this move. 

Reddish egret. Tim Timmis/Audubon Photography Awards

At least wait for your tern! Clearly, nobody taught these two table manners. 

Least terns. Anja Trepper/Audubon Photography Awards

Most animal puns quack us up, but this one is just morbid. 

Snowy owl with red-breasted merganser. Matthew Booth/Audubon Photography Awards

 Are you puffin’ kidding me, bro?

  Atlantic puffins. Krisztina Scheeff/Audubon Photography Awards

Hey, I’m walking here. 

Purple gallinule. Tina Wright/Audubon Photography Awards

And don’t forget that the 2019 Audubon Photography Awards are currently open for submissions! You can submit your best bird photos here. 

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com

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Bullying victims turn into superheroes in inspiring photography project

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Bullying victims turn into superheroes in inspiring photography project

Sometimes a kid needs to feel like a superhero.

Inspired by Avengers: Infinity War, photographer Josh Rossi created a new project that turned kids who have been victims of bullying into superheroes, letting them forget about their daily struggles and feel empowered.

For the project, 15 children got to dress up as their favorite Avengers to unite and fight back against bullying.

The project details each child and the kind of bullying they face, whether because of things they were born with that make them a little different, their ethnicity, their identity, or just being singled out for seemingly no reason at all.

SEE ALSO: Who’s who in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’

Jackson Bezzant, a.k.a. Captain America, was born with facial deformities that led to name-calling from his peers. Another victim of bullying, Cole Helton, is bullied because he is transgender and was transformed into the character Vision. Jackson Sommers, who became Doctor Strange, was born missing 35 percent of his cerebellum, which makes him move and speak a bit slower than some of his fellow students, and has been the victim of verbal and physical bullying.

According to StopBullying.gov, 28 percent of students in the U.S. between grades 6 and 12 experience bullying in some form and more than 70 percent of students have witnessed bullying at school, the most common place such behavior occurs.

On the project page, Rossi explained that he wanted to do something for victims of bullying after he saw a video that Jackson’s dad made about his situation. Rossi reached out to Jackson’s father and told him he was doing a new project about bullying before he even fully visualized it.

“The video was so powerful, however, that it sparked a fire in me to help in whatever way I could,” Rossi wrote. “Jackson Bezzant would soon become the Captain America of this amazing group of kids.”

Rossi has previously worked on projects that turned kids into famous characters, most recently taking inspiration from Justice League to make kids with various conditions into some of DC’s biggest heroes.

WATCH: In honor of ‘Infinity War,’ Chris Evans has blessed the internet with these BTS clips

Read more: http://mashable.com/

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Curious Wildlife Animals Are Super Interested in Photography

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Curious Wildlife Animals Are Super Interested in Photography

Twitter user @Polychromantium’s post about wildlife being super interesting in photography has made everyone SO HAPPY! If you don’t believe us, just scroll down and take a look at how cute they are! 

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Read more: http://failblog.cheezburger.com

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<em>Black Panther</em>s Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

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Black Panthers Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

As Hollywood events go, there are few more congratulatory than film festival awards ceremonies, where everyone wants to cheer for the Next Big Thing before they get huge. Yet, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the biggest applause at the awards show wasn’t for a director or actor—it was for Rachel Morrison, a director of photography on the festival jury. “Earlier this week,” host Jason Mantzoukas said while announcing her name, “she became the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography. Her historic nod is for last year’s Sundance hit Mudbound." Out in the audience, Morrison smiled sheepishly; at her side, fellow jurors Jada Pinkett Smith and Octavia Spencer whooped up a storm. The audience stood to clap.

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To Morrison, the entire scene was surreal. "That was the the first time it settled in," she says a few weeks after Sundance, talking about the film community's response to her groundbreaking nom. "The fact that everybody is cheering me on is moving."

Right now, to use Hollywood parlance, Rachel Morrison is having a moment. Not only is she currently the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, she’s also got another monumental movie coming out this weekend: Marvel's Black Panther, which might end up being one of the biggest comic book flicks yet. (That’s not hyperbole: It currently has a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and is looking at a $170 million debut that could break the President’s Day weekend record previously set by Deadpool.)

It’s been a long time coming. While the lack of gender parity amongst movie directors is known, the dearth of female cinematographers doesn’t get nearly as much attention—despite the statistics being even more striking. Only 4 percent of of the cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing domestic releases of 2017 were women, a figure that was the same two decades ago, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. (By comparison, 11 percent of the directors for those 2017 movies were women.)

Historically speaking, of all the roles women can fill behind-the-scenes in filmmaking—writer, producer, director, editor, etc.—the numbers are lowest for cinematographers. So while there have been enough women hired as directors to get a scant few nominated for Oscars—Kathryn Bigelow is the only one to win, for The Hurt Locker—no female cinematographer has ever gotten a nod from the Academy.

"To see Rachel nominated in a technical category and to realize that in 2018 this is the first time any woman has ever been nominated in that category, is staggering," says Noah Harlan, a former film producer who worked with Morrison when she was a camera operator on the MTV reality series Room Raiders. "So when I think about my own daughters, the fact that I can say ‘Hey, that woman is an amazingly talented person, she did this gorgeous film in Mudbound and she did this amazing action film with Black Panther,’ it’s a really great thing. There’s not enough of those type of role models for young women."

What has caused this disparity beyond just sexism is hard to parse, but American Society of Cinematographers president Kees van Oostrum thinks it might finally be changing, albeit slowly. “The cultural thing is much harder to change and often not noticed by the person propagating it,” van Oostrum says. “In that light, [Morrison’s] Academy Award nomination is wonderful, because it breaks the culture more than anything.”

“Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads. Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

And breaking the culture is necessary. Cinematography, as much as direction, translates the emotions and intensity of a moment onto film. Having people with different life experiences—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc.—involved in a film means their eyes will see things someone else’s might not, and help those things make it into the frame. “Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads,” Morrison says. “Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

For years cinematographers came up through the ranks as third assistant directors who eventually got trained to shoot. Directors tended to be men, and often hired their (male) friends. And “there was this idea of ‘Oh, we can’t hire women because it’s a real physical job,’” van Oostrum says. All the reasons for not hiring women into the profession, he adds, are “easily refutable” but the issue persisted until film school enrollment exploded in the second half of the 20th century, offering opportunities for more people to get trained. Progress is still slow, but van Oostrum points out that female membership in ASC is on the rise—currently 16 of the ASC’s 383 members are women, up from eight in 2005—and film schools are educating female DPs in droves.

Morrison is testament to that, though she says she tries not to get bogged down thinking about the statistics or the fact that she’s an anomaly. “I’ve always tried to think of it as an advantage,” she says. “I get to stand out in the room.” Morrison got her degree in cinematography from the American Film Institute in 2006 and in the intervening years shot more than a dozen features, 10 of them in six years. She worked on the time-travel cult thriller Sound of My Voice and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. Then, a few years later, she experienced “director-DP love at first sight.” Ryan Coogler was looking for a cinematographer for his first feature Fruitvale Station, about the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant by a transit officer in Oakland; Ilyse McKimmie, who runs the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker lab, suggested he connect with Morrison. “We just hit it off,” Morrison says. “The Skype interview went on for two and a half hours, and we laughed and cried. He felt like the brother that I’d always wanted and never had.”

Fruitvale Station went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance in 2013, and Morrison went on to work on more indie hits: Dope; What Happened, Miss Simone?; and eventually Dee Rees’ Mudbound, the wrenching film about post-World War II Mississippi that snagged her that aforementioned Oscar nomination.

Now, with Black Panther, Morrison is bringing her keen eye to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first female cinematographer to do so. The blockbuster scale, thankfully, didn't translate into studio interference. “They give you a very big sandbox to play in,” she says, “and you can do whatever you want within that sandbox. I didn’t feel Marvel was helicopter-parenting us at all.” What Morrison is still adjusting to, though, is the level of hype her latest film is getting. Fans had waited a long time for a black superhero to carry an MCU film; the near universal praise for Black Panther indicates she and Coogler made something that will make them happy. “I was at the premiere,” she says, “and the energy was palpable through the entire movie. I was really proud at the end of it.”

And next month, she might be an Oscar winner. It’s an honor anyone in her profession would like to have, and if Morrison wins, she gets to make history. But being the first female cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar wasn’t the goal. In some ways, it shouldn’t have been a milestone left uncrossed before her.

“There are a ton of women who have been doing amazing work for a long time; it’s unfortunate it’s taken this long [for a woman to be nominated],” she says. “For me, it’s always been about the work—it wasn’t about ‘Let’s go break some ceilings.’ I just wanted to tell an important story and do the best work I can. Everything else is secondary.”

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Read more: http://www.wired.com/

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'Especially relevant': Susan Meiselas wins 2019 Deutsche Brse photography prize

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'Especially relevant': Susan Meiselas wins 2019 Deutsche Brse photography prize

From displaced Kurds to carnival strippers, documentarian praised for carving a new form of socially engaged photography by getting close to long-term subjects

The prestigious Deutsche Brse photography prize has been won by Susan Meiselas, an American whose work over five decades has seen her engage deeply with her subjects, from the scattered communities of the Kurdish diaspora to the women in her still edgy Carnival Strippers series.

The award, which in the past has tended to favour more conceptually driven artists, is a vindication of sorts for this socially committed documentarian. At the Photographers Gallery in London, which hosts the prize, Meiselas chose to exhibit In the Shadow of History, her long-term engagement with the plight of the Kurdish people, which was part of her recent touring retrospective, Mediations. Begun in 1977, ittraces the lives of ordinary Kurds living in exile across the globe using photographs, film, text and projections, all of which reflect the depth of her collaboration with scholars, historians and local communities.

Memory a family in northern Iraq hold photographs of Kamaran Abdullah Saber, killed aged 20 in 1991 at a student demonstration against Saddam Hussein. Photograph: Susan Meiselas/Magnum

On one wall, a map of the world is bedecked with chains that hang from each location where Kurdish communities have formed. From the chains dangle handmade books of personal testimonies and family photographs. They were made by displaced Kurds in workshops that Meiselas organised in cities where her work was shown. In March, she hosted a workshop at the gallery aimed at members of Londons Kurdish communities.

Brett Rogers, chair of the judging panel and director of the Photographers Gallery, praised Meiselass consistent approach to the medium and her personal investment in the stories, histories and communities she documents. She said she has carved out a new and important form of socially engaged photography.

Meiselass collaborative engagement gives her work a sense of humanity that is often absent in traditional reportage. They brought their photographs and their memories, she said last year of a similar workshop held in Paris before the opening of the Mediations retrospective in the city. In this way, the work grows each time it is exhibited.

Photograph: Susan Meiselas

Mediations began with her 1971 series 44 Irving Street, a portrait of her neighbours made when she was still at Harvard University in Massachusetts. The exhibition traced a journey ever outwards, from the intimate observation of Prince Street Girls to the Carnival Strippers series, photographed in the early 1970s from the point of view of a male onlooker, and on to her iconic images of the wars in Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

She has been a Magnum photographer since 1976, when she was one of only five women members of the esteemed photographic agency. Its a complicated issue, she said last year, referring to the gender imbalance that still dogs the photography world despite the rise of a generation of young female photographers, one of whom, Laia Abril, was also in contention for the prize for her timely and hard-hitting series, On Abortion.

She added: Do I want to say, Im a woman photographer and thats what validates my view on the world? Really? Is that it? But, on the other hand, I do speak from a different perspective. I do have a different approach. Part of my role is to be a mediator, someone who brings people together.

Rogers also noted that Meiselass sustainable and ongoing relationship with the people and their contexts and feels especially relevant and resonant today.

It seems that the world, and the art world in particular, may have finally caught up with Meiselass vision when activism and protest suddenly seem more urgent creative responses than theory and process.

The Deutsche Brse Photography Foundation prize exhibition is at the Photographers Gallery, London, until 2 June.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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23 Great Examples of the Middle Line in Art, Photography and Film

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23 Great Examples of the Middle Line in Art, Photography and Film

The ‘middle line’ can be a powerful tool in composition. Here are 23 great examples in art, photography and film.

Read more: http://twistedsifter.com/