Philippe Halsman‘s famous photo of surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, made headlines in its original conception in 1948. The image, titled “Dali Atomicus” is famous for its complexity—the shot took 28 takes to get right—and also for the way it captures the imaginative, outlandish quality of many of Dali’s own works. The photo is inspired by Dali’s work, “Lena Atomicus”, which features a woman amongst a number of floating objects. There are many elements at work in the photo produced by Halsman, and they all had to come together at the right time in order to get this revolutionary photo.
The image was achieved with the help of Dali’s own wife and daughter, who, along with some other assistants, were in charge of throwing the cats and a bucket of water into the air when Halsman counted down. The original “Leda Atomicus” piece, as well as a floating chair and easel, were suspended by thin wires that surrounded Dali. Lastly, Dali leapt into the air at the photographer’s direction while he attempted to snap a photo that brought all of the elements together. The photo set a new standard for interaction between photographer and subject, and inspired hundreds of photographers to take a more collaborative approach in shooting their content.
Now, years later, photographer Karl Taylor has attempted to recreate the iconic image, alongside BBC—and he does a pretty fantastic job. He changes some elements, like replacing the flying cats with a flying toaster and a clock that looks straight out of Dali’s own “The Persistence of Memory”, but other than these slight adjustments, the two photos are remarkably close.
Taylor takes great care to match each element of the photo’s set to the original, even small details like the floor’s wooden border and mysterious staircase landing on the top. The photo comes together much the same way as Halsman’s photo, with Taylor counting down and directing the shot into place. Taylor’s photo even took 29 attempts, which is strangely close to the original production, and he truly captures to complexity that went into Halsman’s game-changing shot. On his inspiration for recreating the famous photo, Taylor says, “This iconic image has been a favorite of mine for as long as I remember and it is probably the root of my own interest and specialization in photographing fast moving liquids and smashing objects.” You can watch Karl Taylor’s full break down of the shot here: via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2AyAv06
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Nick Stern is a renowned photojournalist, artist, filmmaker, and also one of Banksy’s biggest fans. Ok, so he adores Banksy’s work. I mean who doesn’t? But how far would Stern go to prove his adoration? Well, by seamlessly re-enacting Banksy’s most loved and hated work through live portraits. Just the time and effort it took to get the “You Are Not Banksy” project kick-started proves the appreciation for Banksy that Stern has. Most of you may already know that a Banksy speaks though hidden messages and the controversial subjects they bring up. From materialism, greed, capitalism, a rigged system, unqualified law agents, war…Banksy throws shade at it all. He beautifully paints the destruction going on in the world, and it’s rather genius considering most people’s attention spans are too short to read up on it. Banksy knows this decline all too well, so his method to use wall-art to be heard is how he communicates to a world that he feels needs to wake-up and start taking notice.
Not only were the pictures similar to Banksy’s graffiti, but the props, costumes, models, and backdrops were almost an exact replica of the painted version. Also, the behind the scenes of these captures, were in true Banksy style: no permits and no permission. Stern would find the perfect street, then unload and shoot till he got his ideal shot, wrapping up and secretly tiptoeing away after. This rebellious set-up is what Banksy would have wanted. The project strayed away from being trendy, and instead remained dedicated to emphasizing the drear circumstances behind each art piece’s meaning. Overall this brainchild to bring Banksy’s art to life could have been done a long time ago, but we are grateful for Stern to bring Banksy’s work to life.
According to Stern, this will not be the only re-creations of Banksy’s graffiti, and he is still in the works of gathering all the resources for more, so if you’re for this project make sure to keep an eye out for more. Images courtesy of ©Nick Stern via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2ysYIDB In their November 2017 issue, our good friends at Wired featured a short column entitled “Our Selfies, Ourselves,” in which writer Alicia Eler, of The Selfie Generation, comments on various celebrity’s selfies. Lena Dunham’s, for instance, say “‘Fuck it’ and embrace imperfection,” while Samuel L. Jackson’s “show he’s social with a capital S”.
One name in particular, however, caught our eyes here at Resource: James Franco. Yes, that James Franco, infamous for his Instagram activities including unsuccessfully hitting on a 17-year old, and frequently posting pics which had the effect of “creeping out” a sizable chunk of the population (though not us). This name stood out because, as far as we were concerned, Franco had deleted his social media accounts back in February–his last post on Facebook is a family Christmas photo from 2016–and they had yet to return. Thinking we had missed this phoenix’s rebirth, and eager to revisit the scene of some of the artist’s best work, we travelled to the Instagram handle provided in Wired’s chosen screenshot: @jamesfrancoo. What we found there, however, would deeply disturb us. Jamesfrancoo, an account provided by Wired as an example of Franco’s “using Instagram to re-create a teen idol archetype,” was no more than a fan account. We felt supremely duped. We still aren’t sure why WIRED included this account in their article. We feel it must have been intentional since even the tagline of the handle @jamesfrancoo is “I am a big fan of James,” Yet perhaps, we thought– in a moment of desperation–the fact that the tagline on the page did not necessarily rule out that it was Franco’s account: after all if anyone were to comment on their being fans of themselves in the third person, it would probably be James Franco. Needless to say, this would turn out not to be the case. Jamesfrancoo himself (or herself) provided a link to the “official” Franco page, jamesfrancotv, the clicking of which led us here: The moral of the story: don’t believe everything you read. Especially if it involves the resurfacing of a dearly missed teenage heartthrob on social media.
Feature Image Courtesy Franco’s Deceased Instagram, RIP
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2yQ3JKE Last week, as part of their #ShootForGreatness campaign, Canon set up the Ultimate Photo Park in the Allouche Gallery of downtown Manhattan. Stocked with a few Canon EOS Rebel T7i’s, a litany of experts, one Instagram-famous photographer (Chelsea Yamase), and a collection of zany sets, the doors were opened to all those seeking “unique shots” and “mind-boggling perspectives.”
The #ShootForGreatness campaign launched with a Rube-Goldberg-esque ad entitled Canon: Perfect Moments in which, throughout the process, several stills are captured, only to be revealed at the end. The idea behind it is that a Canon DSLR allows photographers to capture moments and angles which would typically be impossible if they only had a smartphone in hand. In an effort to win back customers, it seems Canon is attempting to make the case that for all of its of portability, a smartphone shouldn’t be your go-to for documentation due its limited capabilities. Thus, it closes with the slogan: “The right place…at the right time…means nothing without the right camera.”
While only time will tell how successful Canon will be at convincing customers that “taking photos on your smartphone just won’t cut it,” the shots from the Photo Park are already in, and Resource got their hands on ’em. We also spoke to a Canon rep who was generous enough to answer some of our questions. Enjoy!
Here’s our conversation with Canon (emphasis ours): You guys decided to team up with Instagrammers for this event. How do you convince the typical social media content creator to upgrade from their usual device (cameraphone most likely) to an EOS Rebel T7i or the like?
Your slogan for this campaign is “shoot for greatness.” What is your conception of photographic “greatness”? And how do these fantastical sets you’ve provided fit into that idea?
Chelsea Yamase was your featured artists for this event. What is it about her work that made you decide to bring her in?
For those that missed the event or are hungry for more: has the ultimate photo park made its last stop in New York, or can we expect it to find its way back to the Big Apple?
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY MIKE COPPOLA/GETTY IMAGES FOR CANON
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2Arlah4 If you’re anything like me, you’ve experienced problems with your skin to some degree. You’ve had your fair share of acne break outs, suffered winters with a dull, pale face, or woke up to notice a couple extra creases under your eyes that you swear weren’t there the day before. This can be frustrating, and I know from experience that it can feel like facial imperfections are the only thing a person can look at while they’re talking to you. I remember countless times that I’d take a great selfie or had a friend snap a picture of me, only to realize that the camera had somehow made these imperfections even more noticeable. While the advancing technology of cameras allows for crystal clear images, this also means it picks up all the red spots, wrinkles and bumps. There’s a stigma around editing physical features in photos, but I don’t find anything wrong with touching up your picture if it’ll make you feel more confident. After all, you are free to share whatever you damn well please, so you may as well make it something you feel good about. Here are 6 of the best, free iPhone apps for a quick skin fix:
1. Line Camera: I have the most experience with this app, I’ve been using it for years because it is so easy to use. Fixing your skin is incredibly simple once you upload the picture and start “designing”. By clicking the small bunny icon in the bottom left of the screen, you can begin enhancing your photo, starting with a great automatic brighten and smoothen feature done by the app. You can then go to the “skin care” tab in the bottom panel and choose from either “blemishes” or “dark circle”. Both allow you to zoom in on the picture and easily tap to erase any pimple or discoloration. The photo comes away looking pretty flawless but surprisingly natural.
2. Airbrush: This app comes with a shocking amount of features for a free app, and they are all relatively straightforward. First the smoothen feature allows you to drag a finger over your skin to blur out any lines or divets, which is especially good for getting rid of acne scars. There is also a tab specifically for acne, which has an automatic fix feature or lets you tap any spot you’d like to cover. The app also has a “skin tone” feature which is perfect for coloring up a pale face or adding a bit of blush to dull cheeks. More features like “firm” which targets wrinkles, and “sculpt” which thins out your face, are available but only if you upgrade to the paid version of the app.
3. Pixlr: This app doesn’t primarily function as a physical feature editing app, but it has the essential tools to fix any facial imperfection. The notable ones are “smooth” and “heal”. The smooth feature doesn’t let you actually do the smoothening yourself, but you can control the strength of the blurred effect on your photo, and the app does a good job of monitoring the smoothness for you. The “heal” feature does allow you to tap the image and fix blemishes yourself. You can choose the strength of the effect but be warned that this feature really only works if you keep the scale on the smaller size. Utilizing this feature at maximum strength leaves the skin looking discolored.
4. Perfect 365: This app has a number of features that cater specifically to skin—there is “blemishes”, “brighten skin”, “soften skin”, “foundation”, and “blush”. The range of this application is great, and for a photo that needs some light edits, this is the perfect app to use. However, you are only able to modify the strength of the effect that the app determines, you can’t actually tap or drag to control the areas that need extra help. If your photo needs enhancement in tiny, particular details then this app isn’t for you. But if you are just looking for some light edits without much effort on your part than this is a good choice.
5. Facetune 2: This app has a crazy amount of features, only problem is that only about 1/4 are available with the free version of the app—the paid version goes for $3.99. The free edition does have some features like “glow”, “conceal”, “matte”, and “smooth”, but the effects are subtle and there isn’t much range to control the areas that need enhancement. The app also comes with features that allow you to slim down the face or plump the lips. If you decide you want to pay for the full experience, the editing tools are much more expansive. The free version of Facetune 2 is a great app for a really quick fix on a photo that doesn’t need much help to begin with.
6. Selfie Editor: This app was a bit difficult to get the hang of, and I couldn’t tell if the effects were really doing much to fix my photo. However, once I played around for a while I got a better handle on how the app works and was able to use their features relatively easily. The highlight is “patch”, which allows you to take a clear area of skin and sort of place it on top of a blemish to cover the redness. This works best for small blemishes—it is very easy to use, all you do is drag your finger from one part of the face to the next. Control over bigger areas is difficult, though, because the app doesn’t allow you to effectively target a larger area. The app also has the classic smoothen tool, but the effects are subtle.
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2zHIrz1 So your following has plateaued and you’re not sure what to do next. You’ve given it all you’ve got but you’re just not breaking that ceiling of 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000; what’s your move? Sometimes, people just want to get down and dirty and ask for those follows, no matter how uncomfortable doing so may be. If that happens to be your style, we’ve scoured the interwebs and put together a collection of some of the most creative ways in which people have gone about requesting you to follow them on social media: Watch in awe (or cringe), and allow the inspiration to flow.
1. Make a Music Video
2. Make Everyone Aware Of Your Best Attributes
Why follow Moses? CUZ “MOSES IS A HIT!” 3. Offer $TRAIGHT CA$H Evidently ballin’ Youtube member Crazy Skippy offers the chance to win a crisp C-note should you choose to follow him on social media. More than that, he’s offering a free signature on each one, too! Buyers beware, some comments on his video seem to point towards Crazy Skippy’s penchant for announcing sweepstakes without following through:
Nonetheless, the giveaway worked to perfection with at least one subscriber: 4. Acknowledge the Cringe
I definitely didn’t know the term cringe when I was your age, precocious young social media star. 5. Expose Secret Glitch That Allows Everyone Who Likes Your Video To Receive Free iPhone 7 Can you believe this guy? Alerting us all to a potentially valuable Youtube glitch and all he asks for in return is a “Like Comment Share and Subscribe” and a “Stalk” on social media? Talk about a selfless hero, Sully‘s got nothing on this kid. 6. Keep It Simple FACE WRIST FRAPP Know your audience. 7. Be Open About It
Radical transparency is the name of the game. 8. Just Dance Her moves are so tight, bots create themselves just to follow.
Cover Photo by Ariel Lustre on Unsplash
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I’ve spent an enjoyable morning looking back through all our #ThursdayTheme blog posts and I’m in awe of the talent we have in this group! We’ve had purple, yellow, orange, green and blue so it was only a matter of time before we saw your red photography. Have we had all the colours of the rainbow now? I’m sure we could still have a few more!
#FridayFoto is this lovely bit of macro from Cheryl Toepfer!
Here’s what Julie had to say about Cheryl’s image: “Don’t you just love how macro can make the most everyday subject look totally other-worldly? I love how my eye is drawn into that pop of yellow on the thirds and then moves around to take in the entire image. The blurred red foreground works really well to give the image so much depth. It’s such a rich and dramatic photograph yet it’s so incredibly simple. Gorgeous work Cheryl!”
Thank you so much for all your RED contributions. Join us… ?
Aga Wlodarczak
Ana Martinez
Caroline Oliver
Chantal Macleod-Holdsworth
Corrie Dean
Emilie Jensen
Eszter Szabo
Katie Barket
Kelly Dunn
Kirsty Wise
Lone Kiter
Marina De Wit
Marta Andrew
Nicole Critten
Olwyn Hunter Young
Russell Bain
Ruth Skiffington
Samantha Nicol
Stefano Calderan
Pop by and request to join – you’ll love it! The post Red Photography – A selection of Images from our #ThursdayTheme appeared first on Tea Break Tog. via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2jaQFbO Photographers beware; the impact of AI on the profession is likely to be much greater than previously assumed. While the ability of AI to sort and find images has long been recognized–and cheered on by businesses, photo editors, and individuals consumers alike–the ability of AI to replace not only the skills, but the photographer herself, is slowly coming down the pipeline. It’s high time to reflect. Image Sorting, Suggested Tagging, and Facial Recognition
For a little while now, computers have been able to look at our images and “see” what we want them to “see.” For the most part, this has been a welcome development that most of us engage with every day. Some examples: reverse image search, Facebook’s suggested auto-tagging, and the software organizing our favorite stock image sites–saving editors literally thousands of hours of sorting work. The drawbacks to this tech, however, have been widely noted, the most glaring example being Google Photos labelling an African American couple “gorillas.” Notice this is not an random, otherworldly pairing of object and title, but rather a highlight of some of the most racist undercurrents in our society. As noted on The Verge: “the prejudices and inequalities of society often become hard-coded in AI.” This includes language software which assumes doctors are male, and nurses female. While this is highly disturbing, it is not an unfixable problem (Google launched the PAIR program in July with the aim of making sure that AI “benefits and empowers everyone”). Our indignation aimed at the researchers behind this tech is analogous to what Emily Parker writes in the NYT regarding our blaming social media for the recent election results: “We don’t like this reflection [of ourselves], so we blame the mirror.” Remember, AI only “knows” what we teach it. It “learns” the contents of a photo by being shown thousand of photos along with the corresponding description of their object. If it thinks doctors are always male, or can’t recognize a race of people as properly homo sapien, we are left to wonder what it is in our society that would lead a recent entrant to it, like these machines, to such conclusions. And this is a conversation worth having. Image Improvement
More recently, perhaps unsurprisingly, AI has taken the leap into into improving image quality. A prominent development in this field has been the work of researchers Andrey Ignatov, Nikolay Kobyshev, Radu Timofte, Kenneth Vanhoey and Luc Van Gool. In a paper entitled “DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks,” presented at the 2017 International Conference on Computer Vision, this team outlined a nifty algorithm they developed to yes, take DSRL-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices. If it sounds too good to be true, well, it sorta is. The tech isn’t perfect, and while it certainly brightens and sharpens an image, it often (in my experience and others) leaves a funny tint. As the researchers themselves concede, “Since the proposed enhancement process is fully-automated, some flaws are inevitable. Two typical artifacts that can appear on the processed images are color deviations…and too high contrast levels.” Nonetheless, it is leading the way and, as the first iteration of its sort, it’s pretty impressive. To develop their AI, they showed it “a large-scale dataset that consists of real photos captured from three different phones and one high-end reflex camera,” teaching it to translate the former to the latter. By doing so, while focusing on specific parameters, the AI learns what it “takes,” to turn a cellphone photo into a DSLR photo. For those of you interested in testing it out, they’ve set up a website where you can upload a photo for AI-enhancement. “ The only thing it can’t do,” Engadget’s Jon Fingas writes, “is add details that weren’t already there,” which brings us to our next topic:
Adding Details
“Single image super-resolution is the task of inferring a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution input,” or, in other words, using that enhance tool they always talk about on crime shows. While for the longest time this has been no more than a myth (one which photographers love to point out to fans of CSI and the like), researchers at the Max Planck Institute have made great strides turning in turning this into a reality. Typically the approach taken towards “super-resolution” is trying to get the highly-pixelated original image to look as if it had more definition by seeking to reconstruct, based upon clues, what the original image would look like had it been shot in a higher resolution. This accords with our CSI-type notions that there is an original reality to be found. However, this team of researchers decided to flip the process on its head, and to great success. Seeking to recover pixels that aren’t there, while intuitively the proper way to go about enhancing resolution, simply “correlate[s] poorly with the human perception of image quality,” leading to “over-smoothed images that lack high-frequency textures and do not look natural.” Instead, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi and his team focused on the textures present in photographs, seeking to teach AI to recreate them. To do so, they fed their AI thousands of samples of textures in low-quality, asking it to upsample them. Afterwards, they compared these to the original, high-quality shots of the textures and, for any mistakes, the researchers retweaked the algorithm until it achieved a quality they found to be believable. The results are fairly astounding. As the head researcher notes, and is quite obvious, “There are a lot of applications for this…from upsampling old movies to 4K quality” to “restoring old family photographs that are too blurry when you want to get a large print.” Also: catching that hard-to-find perpetrator.
Taking Photos
So AI can tag your photos, sort your photos, improve their quality, and up their resolution, adding details that were never there to begin with. All of these abilities come into play in post-production, with AI acting as a tool for the human photographer. But what if AI were to replace the photographer altogether, acting as its own image maker from start finish? Google researchers Hui Fang and Meng Zhang sought to do just that. The Creatism system, outlined in a July 11th paper, crops, adjusts saturation, adjusts high dynamic range (HDR) and alters lighting in order to produce a professional-quality photograph from a Google Street View frame fed to it. Some of the resulting images fooled the pros. Of 173 photos taken by the Creatism system and evaluated by professional photographers (on a scale of 1-4):
Much like other AI, Creatism was informed by being shown 15,000 photos of top-ranking landscape photographers. It added lighting or saturation to each input, producing four versions of each. Then, from the four, a group of professional photographers selected one as the best, verifying the algorithm used to create it as the proper method. From there, Creatism was given full panoramas, and allowed to crop as it liked, “mimic[king] the workflow of a landscape photographer.” For any photographers who want to Creatism a run for its money, a full gallery of its work can be found here.
What’s It All Mean?
In his new exhibit “A Study of Invisible Images,” artist Trevor Paglen urges us to answer just that. As these “images” come to be the dominant point of view on our planet, dictating the way we live (self-driving cars) to how we view ourselves (AI-powered image editing) we need to ask ourselves not only how they work but how we want them to work.
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11/7/2017
On October 31st, 2017 Anok Yai was signed to Next Models. On October 21st, 2017 she was not. The difference? This photo:
Following Howard University’s homecoming festival, Yard Fest, Anok Yoi was heading out when photographer Steve Hall of the fashion website The SUNK, approached her and asked if he could take her photograph. Ms. Yoi obliged.
Since its posting that evening, the image has gathered 19.4k likes and 600+ comments. Her own following, meanwhile, exploded to 97k followers and counting. She began receiving offers from modeling agencies to fly her to New York, eventually agreeing to a contract with Next Models on Halloween.
Prior to her whirlwind ascendancy, Anok was studying biochemistry at Plymouth State University. Though she grew up hoping to become a model–frequently watching the legendary ANTM— she had all but given up, planning on becoming a doctor instead. Then her luck changed. A rising star, we’ll keep an eye out for where Anok goes from here. As for her beginnings, Ms. Yai had this to say of the image that brought her fame, as per WaPo: “she thought it made her look like a ‘deer in headlights’…describing it as ‘average’.
via RSSMix.com Mix ID 8230553 http://ift.tt/2m22RNa It’s been about six months since Wesaturate, the photo-sharing community founded by three young engineers “trying to change the world,” went live. Accepting exclusively RAW or JPEG files, the site billed itself as a unique platform focused on learning. To that end, stricter-than-normal rules were enforced to ensure quality. Users are limited to five uploads a day, for example, because they don’t want Wesaturate to be your “file storage service” –they recommend Dropbox– but a place to “learn” and “experiment with different edits.” It’s coolest feature, however, has been Replies, which allows users to “not only download free RAW photos,” but to edit them and upload “for the world to see.” Introduced on September 4th–almost five months after launch–the service was reportedly “requested by many” through its feedback channels. It’s like a photographer’s game of exquisite corpse.
Needless to say, the site’s doing well, with a lively community and a stocked library. The founders, meanwhile, are actively involved. Besides adding Replies, they’ve also fixed user-reported bugs and issued a manual on their blog on how to attain Google-fu, mastery of the search engine.
Even if you don’t want to share, or would like to share but don’t want to provide RAW files, you can still join and download unlimited images for editing, enjoying, or inspiration. Get crackin’.
Feature Image Courtesy jgudinho
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