America’s top hand models

Headshots of some hand models and the hands that made them famous. The hands of one of the models even replaced Megan Fox’s hands — you know, the toe-thumbed ones — in a Motorola commercial. (via clusterflock)

• Megan Fox

Megan Fox’s toe thumb

The cover of this week’s NY Times Magazine features Megan Fox.

If she’s so manufactured, shouldn’t she do something about that toe thumb of hers? (Sorry Fox fans, once you see the toe thumb, it’s impossible to unsee.)

• Megan Fox

Moving photography

For the cover of Esquire’s June issue, photographer Greg Williams shot ten minutes of video footage of Megan Fox, from which the best stills were selected for the cover and inside the magazine.

As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it’s not such a huge shift for them. The photographer’s exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.

Esquire’s moving cover reminds me of two other things.

1. Flickr encourages their members to think of short videos as long photos. When he guest edited kottke.org last year, Deron Bauman wrote about short video as a contemporary version of the photograph. Matt Jones argued that looping short video is the real long photography. So maybe the photograph of 10 years from now might not even be a still image.

2. In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering…that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

• Megan Fox
• photography
• Planet Earth
• video