I wrote a while back about one of my favourite photographs but this might just give it a run for its money.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway.
These are great photos of the speakers at Beyond Tellerrand—great captures of Sharon, Cassie, and Charlotte.
The Web is smothering in useless images. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution because they take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight. They also slow down the site’s ability to download quickly.
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
PIctures of computers (of the human and machine varieties).
I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:
I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.
I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:
I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.
Ballardian spaces.
A lovely interactive photo essay charting the results of what happens when evolution produces a life form that allows a planet to take selfies.
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.
Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.
Photos of analogue interfaces: switches, knobs, levers, dials, buttons, so many buttons.
According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.
This is an interesting use of voodoo magic (or “machine learning” as we call it now) by Google to interpolate data in a small image to create a larger version. A win for performance.
A selection from an ongoing photography project—seven years and counting—leading up to the launch of the Orion project.
Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.
An ongoing photography project from Curtis:
Beyond Work tells stories about humans at work, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work, that’s become invisible in everyday life.
Set aside some time: Craig is reviewing a camera again (and you remember how epic that was last time).
Craig recently had a piece published in the New Yorker called Goodbye, Cameras. It’s good …but this follow-on piece on his own site is truly wonderful.
Read. Absorb. Ponder.
Being close to the network does not mean being on Facebook, thought it can mean that, too. It does not mean pushing low-res images to Instagram, although there’s nothing wrong with that. What the network represents, in my mind, is a sort of ledger of humanity. The great shared mind. An image’s distance to it is the difference between contributing or not contributing to that shared ledger.
Celebrating 125 years of National Geographic, this Tumblr blog is a curated collection of photography from the archives. Many of the pictures are being published for the first time.
