kottke.org posts about photography
Aerial photos of cities taken by Olivo Barbieri with a tilt-shift lens look like scale models. I’m familiar with the tilt-shift (Jake noodled around with one awhile back), but didn’t imagine you could use it to achieve such a convincing optical illusion. (via bldgblog via waxy)
Giant jellyfish invade Japan STOP Creatures 2 meters wide and 450 pounds STOP Killing fish, fishing industry, and even humans STOP Run for your lives STOP
“no sampling, please”, a photoset depicting binge-sampling of nearly everything in sight, contrary to posted signage.
I can’t remember where I first ran across Edward Burtynsky’s photography, but I’ve been developing into a full-fledged fan of work over the past few months. From a Washington Post article on Burtynsky:
Burtynsky calls his images “a second look at the scale of what we call progress,” and hopes that at minimum, the images acquaint viewers with the ramifications โ he avoids the word price โ of our lifestyle. But what if viewers just see, you know, some dudes and a ship?
“Another photographer might focus on the loss of life or pollution,” acknowledges Kennel of the National Gallery. “He uses beauty as a way to draw attention to something. It’s a very particular strategy.”
The Brooklyn Museum of Art is displaying an exhibition of Burtynsky’s photos until January 15. Well worth the effort to try and check it out. The scale of modernity, particularly in his recent photos of China, is astounding. In Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4, this huge dam seems to stretch on forever and you don’t know whether to goggle in wonder or shrink in horror from looking at it.
Adobe has released the beta version of a program called Lightroom (OS X only), a competitor to Apple’s Aperture. Both are pro-level apps for manipulating and organizing digital photos. Here’s the story of Lightroom’s development from one of its developers. (via df)
Over the holidays, Meg and I went up to Vermont skiing. I skied quite a bit when I was in middle/high school (on the small hills of northwestern WI and east central MN), but I’d only strapped on the boards a couple times since graduating from college. Meg’s family has skied at Mad River Glen for years, so that’s where we went. After three straight days of hitting the slopes, my back got a little wonky, so on the 4th day I brought the camera along to document a run down the mountain:

There are a few photos of Waitsfield (the town closest to Mad River) and the surrouding area at the beginning of the set, but most are from the mountain, including some of the best winter views I’ve ever witnessed. The snow covering the trees, the fog at the top of the hill…it looked almost magical. At one point, I was alone on the mountain with my camera, engulfed in fog, no one within 200 yards. With no wind and all the snow & fog muffling the sound, when I stopped breathing, I couldn’t hear anything at all.
Where does the time go? It’s been more than a month since we got back from Asia, but I haven’t posted my photos from Bangkok or Saigon yet. Time for amends, so with my apologies, here are a collection of photos I took in Bangkok.

Here’s my posts from the rest of the Asia trip and my photos from Hong Kong. Saigon photos tomorrow (hopefully).
Retrievr is a simple, amazing use of the Flickr API. You draw a little drawing and Retrievr fetches similar photos from Flickr. Photodisc, the stock photo site, used to have a feature like this back in 1997-98, but then they discontinued it (I have no idea why…it was insanely useful). One feature request…instead of a drawing, let me pick a starting Flickr photo and find me similar ones. (via mh)
USASODA.com has tons of images of old soda cans. They’re a little hard to find, but there’s good stuff if you dig around a little bit.
Gothamist interview with my friend Lisa Whiteman about her photography. Lisa is one of the most thoughtful people I know and it shows in this interview.
Scientists have created photo prints from bacteria. “The results are not only much sharper than what can be produced with a photo printer, but also point the way to a new industry โ building useful objects from living organisms.”
The Burtynsky exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art sounds good. I hope to get over there before it closes on January 15. Here’s his site with lots of photographs. “He often will shoot an image on three or four different brands of film, then print each image on three or four different brands of paper…then chooses the combination that produces the richest and most vivid look.”

A small selection of photos from Hong Kong. Photos from Bangkok and Saigon coming soon.
Zach Klein: “Then, just now, I remembered that I live in the future.” (Related but unrelated, now that we’re living in the future, what do we expect to happen in the actual future? This is actually a serious question…society has a collective vision of the future and now that we’re there โ ubiquitous huge flat panel tvs, real-time recording/documenting of everything, Segways, personally targetted advertising, etc. โ what’s our new collective vision of the future like?)
Photoshop contest results: unretouched celebrity photos. Love the Botox-less Madonna.
Nikon has issued a recall for certain batteries used in the D100, D70, and D50…the battery has a flaw that may cause it to overheat and melt. Check the site for your battery’s lot number to see if you’re affected.
Photos of some difficult runways on which to land a plane. (via tmn)
Update: Oops, looks like that link has some NSFW ads on it. Sorry about that and thanks to everyone who wrote in. I totally didn’t see the ads when I looked at the photos before…my ad blindness is now complete if I’m missing pr0n.
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