20 Creative Visionary Photographs By Young People

Just to prove it is not age but ideas that make great photographs, from The Huffington Post

Whether you’re posting the occasional selfie to Instagram or mastering the art of dog portraits, it’s a good time to be a young photographer. And now, Flickr’s spotlighting the power of young peoples’ photography with its first annual 20 Under 20 celebration.

The 20 nominees, hailing everywhere from Australia to Germany, will have their work displayed during a gala event at NYC’s Milk Studios on Oct. 1. You can vote for the three Audience Choice Awards by tweeting “#Flickr20u20” along with the name of the photographers you think should win #mostcreative, #besttechnique and #strongestportfolio.

Alex Benetel Alex’s photographs are filled with beautiful oddities, like the one above, which she called, “Once and for all, they abandoned what they knew.”

Chrissie White Chrisse loves taking magical shots of the natural world.

Laurence Philomene Laurence has already won the Curator’s Choice Award for her ethereal pictures.

Olivia Bee This photo, titled “Sunrise Dream” shows Olivia’s ability to transform everyday settings into mystical dreamlands.

See the rest of the series here

The death of professional photography – another nail in the coffin

Most Of The Pics In Ikea’s Catalog Are Computer Generated

The Huffington Post tells us that now cameras and photographers are irrelevant to making images of products

Most of what you see here is not a real photo. | CGSociety

The same kitchen, designed to appeal to three different nationalities

Those picturesque still-life scenes in Ikea catalogs aren’t real.

Up to 75 percent of the Ikea products in catalog displays are computer-generated images, according to CGSociety, an Australian graphic-design group. That’s up from25 percent just two years ago.

An Ikea spokeswoman did not respond to a request from The Huffington Post for comment. A spokesman for CGSociety did not return a call from HuffPost to ask whether the group had a business relationship with Ikea.

 

The transition to computer imagery started in the 2006 catalog, with a single image of a blond-finished wood chair called “Bertil.” As the company’s reach spread around the globe, with different products in various markets, traditional photography became expensive and difficult to manage. Making tweaks to products for certain local markets would require new catalog photos for each market, for example.

Instead of doing that, the company built up a digital library of 25,000 three-dimensional models, which may have helped Ikea speed up the phasing out of its photography.

Ikea last year used these 3-D models in a new “augmented reality” feature for the app version of its catalog. The feature lets customers superimpose 3-D images of Ikea products wherever they point their smartphone cameras — into an empty kitchen or living room, for example.

See the full article here

Gordon Parks’ 1950s Photo Essay On Civil Rights-Era

From The Huffington Post

Going to church. Playing around the house. Window shopping. These are the types of everyday, seemingly innocuous activities that wound up before the lens of iconic civil rights photographer Gordon Parks. Parks, a self-taught artist, believed in the photographic medium as a weapon of change, capable of awakening people’s hearts and undoing prejudice.

An exhibition of Parks’ rare color photographs, entitled “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,” will go on view this fall at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The photos capture a particularly disturbing moment in American history, captured via the lives of an African American family, the Thorntons, living under Jim Crow segregation in 1950s Alabama.

The images, originally titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” were first taken for a photo essay for Life Magazine in 1956. The essay chronicles the lesser-seen daily effects of racial discrimination, revealing how prejudice pervades even the most banal and personal of daily occurrences. Parks doesn’t photograph protests, rallies, acts of violence or momentous milestones in civil rights history. No, he prefers the quieter moments in and around the home.

Some photos focus on inequality — a “colored” line at an ice cream stand or black children window shopping amongst all white mannequins. Others hint ominously at violence, as one child plays with a gun and another examines it solemnly. Such images are especially haunting in retrospect, considering the recent death toll of American black men in this country, over half a century after these photographs were taken.

Yet the majority of Parks’ photos focus on the positive over the negative, showing a different breed of civil rights documentation. In the image below, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton sit firmly, proud and composed, affirming their existence. Instead of highlighting discrimination here, Parks emphasizes the similarities that bind all Americans: spending time in the home, being with family, exploring nature. Parks’ images revealed what so many Americans struggled to understand: the human link that connects us all.

See the full set of images here

 

Meet the Top 30 Most Influential Photographers on the Web

From The Huffington Post

Ansel Adams once said that, “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” Photography is a visual medium that permeates our culture, and especially the digital space. While words may be the backbone of the internet, images are what give it pizzazz and intrigue. As much as 93 percent of engaging posts on sites like Facebook have pictures attached. Thanks in part to engaged and talented photographers, the web is a beautiful place to explore.

Making one’s mark online as a photographer takes a lot more than photographic genius, it also requires a keen social presence and the ability to connect with varied audiences. These visual superstars must master the art of social followings, providing valuable insights about the industry in addition to sharing their inspiring photos. These are the photographers that continuously transform and shape the industry, carving out future trends and alerting the masses to new technologies and techniques….READ MORE

To assist the millions of professional and amateur photographers looking to improve their craft and their social followings, I asked these experts about the social trends and online photography tips. Below are some of the most significant insights from the top 30 experts.

Lesson #1: Storytelling Is the Key to Viral Images……..

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18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

From HP

Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.

Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don’t have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.

And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they’re complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it’s not just a stereotype of the “tortured artist” — artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.

“It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. “The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self … Imaginative people have messier minds.”

While there’s no “typical” creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here are 18 things they do differently.

Read on and find out how creative you might be or how you can become more so

Startups battle for rights to smartphone images

In the last 5 years or so there has been a battle fought over the ownership of images uploaded to social networking sites. This has been fuelled by news organisations asking, “Are you there”, “Do you have pictures” “Send us your photos” This is feeding the apparent requirement for immediacy and the cost of course is quality. Press photographers are professionals, they have not just equipment that is appropriate to the task but they also have skills, experience and follow journalistic principles. This article in the BJP provides clues to the next nail in the coffin for press photographers. A new startup which aims to harness social media technologies to source news story photographs.

The popularity of connected devices and smartphones has transformed each of us into potential news gatherers, and now a growing number of startups are offering services to connect us with media organisations, Olivier Laurent reports

On 07 June, when Santa Monica gunman John Zawahri went on a rampage, killing his father and brother before firing on three other people near a college, CrowdMedia – a new website whose task is to filter through images posted on Twitter – was coming online for the first time. “This happened within 15 minutes of our launch,” says CEO Martin Roldan. “We were able to get the licence for the only images shot from inside the college while it was happening. The photographs were picked up by a couple of news organisations, including the Huffington Post. It showed that CrowdMedia worked.” 

 Based in Montreal, CrowdMedia is the latest startup in the battle for people’s pictures, as smartphone devices have transformed us all into potential press photographers, ready to transmit images of newsworthy events as they happen.

“We built a social media monitoring tool, Ejenio, last year,” says Roldan. “It allowed businesses to monitor what people were saying about them on Twitter and Facebook. While we were working on Ejenio, we realised there were a lot of good, newsworthy images on Twitter, but media organisations often had trouble finding them and getting the rights to use them. We saw a real niche there, so we shifted our focus to photography.”

Launched in June, the platform sifts through more than 150 million social photographs posted on Twitter in real-time. Using geolocation information and keywords entered by staff, CrowdMedia selects 0.03 percent of these images which it deems newsworthy. “We input that information manually, but we’re working on tweaks to improve our algorithm, and soon the platform will be able to detect automatically when something happens around the world, and search for relevant images,” explains Roldan.

“The beauty of it is that, unlike other startups relying on mobile apps that users have to install in the first place, our audience and user base is already there. When we find a newsworthy image, the platform automatically sends a tweet to the user, who just has to click on a link to confirm that the photograph is his and whether he accepts to sell it for half of the proceeds.”

CrowdMedia sells a non-exclusive licence for $20, whatever the image’s content. “After 48 hours, that price goes down to $5 because we are only interested in what is happening in real time,” Roldan explains. “We are aware that $20 is a low figure and this has been the only criticism we have received so far. Of course, we’re listening to what people are saying. But it might be that it’s the right kind of pricing and that people are just not used to that. When an event has global reach, like the recent plane crash in San Francisco, images of the scene can be sold more than 1000 times at a $20 price tag. The copyright owner could easily make $10,000.” I would ask but how many pictures used actually earn any money and how many photo journalists will there be in 10 years time if this becomes the standard.

Newspapers now routinely do not employ photographers, they use freelancers who previously would have been staff, guaranteed a salary, now they are paid on a job basis and usually not enough to earn a decent living. The Fairfax group, Australia’s main newspaper group didn’t send any photographers to the 2012 Olympics apparently.

 

There are now many ways for newspapers, what an outmoded term that is, news organisations, that is better, to obtain images and certainly in some instances immediacy is important because unexpected events rarely feature experienced photo journalists as onlookers. The problem it seems to us here at OSP Towers (and we are not photo-journalists) is that the whole world is becoming dumbed down. It is obvious to us here that the nature of poor quality, both technically and visually, images just makes everyone more likely to accept less, less in every way. Soon the bottom of the barrel will be the norm. It is happening in so many of the varied creative occupations; decent writing in newspaper/online where ever, is now being superceded by blogs, which rarely have editors or any form of objective control. The creative professional, although hailed as important is being slowly edged out of the way to accommodate lower costs, and in the end the cost to all of us is a demeaned experience.

Read all of the BJP article here