Tag: photography

Boda Boda fashion show: equipping Nairobi motor taxi drivers with outfits to match their glorious bikes

Boda Bodas are the ubiquitous motorbike taxis of Nairobi; Boda Boda drivers are in an arms-race to produce the most elaborately decorated motorbikes in order to differentiate themselves from the competition.
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Kickstarting a two-book collection of Anthony “Tonky” Clune’s street photos

For many years, we’ve brought you the delightful arts and crafts of Anthony “Tonky” Clune: beautiful felt housewares, giant wall-stickers, a short film about thrifting, cool reflective cycling safety badges and more.
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Do Not Erase: Jessica Wynne’s beautiful photos of mathematicians’ chalkboards

Fashion Institute of Technology photographer Jessica Wynne‘s “Don Not Erase” project documents the beautiful chalkboards of mathematicians, which will be collected in a book from Princeton University Press in 2020 (Christmas 2020 will be a lot simpler for me as a result).
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Library of Congress releases 11,700 freely usable photos of “roadside America,” taken by John Margolies

For decades, architectural critic and photographer John Margolies obsessively documented roadside attractions: vernacular architecture, weird sculpture, odd businesses and amusements. By his death in 2016, his collection consisted of more than 11,000 slides (he published books of his favorites, with annotations).
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Magic Lantern: feature-rich addons for Canon EOS cameras

Magic Lantern is a suite of feature-rich add-ons for your Canon EOS camera that you load via a SD card; in addition to a suite of video-recording tools, Magic Lantern allows fine-grained gain adjustments, selection of input sources, wind filters, audio monitoring, and better tools for everything from white-balance to exposure presets to overlays to help with exposure and other settings. The source is available for inspection and modification, of course. (via Four Short Links)

Photographing computers to show the art inside the black box

[Editor’s note: I was utterly taken with the gorgeous photos in the new edition of Core Memory, photographer Mark Richards and writer John Alderman’s lavish survey of the vintage computing hardware in Silicon Valley’s gem, the Computer History Museum; below is senior curator Dag Spicer’s introduction to the book, along with some photos, which the publisher was kind enough to supply -Cory]

What computers mean to us depends largely on what we bring to them. Our expectations, our past experience, the dreams and myths that surround them, their physical characteristics—all these aspects resonate on multiple, often overlapping levels.
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Behold! A 400,000 megapixel panorama of Prague!

Jeffrey Martin (previously) writes, “I shot this gigapixel image last year in mid November. It’s made of 8000 photos, shot with a fullframe SLR and a 600mm lens. It was shot from the
top of Prague’s ‘Orloj’, the clock tower on Old Town Square, built in 1410.
The tower had a scaffolding all over it at the time, going all the way up
past the top of the roof: a perfect platform for a high resolution 360º
photo, if only I could get up there! I actually didn’t even consider
trying, as the answer to such questions is usually ‘no’. My colleague, a
rather more enterprising Marketing guy, was able to smooth talk them into
saying ‘yes’. Wow!
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DeOldify: a free/open photo-retoucher based on machine learning

Jason Antic’s DeOldify is a Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network-based machine learning system that colorizes and restores old images. It’s only in the early stages but it’s already producing really impressive results, and the pipeline includes a “defade” model that is “just training the same model to reconstruct images that augmented with ridiculous contrast/brightness adjustments, as a simulation of fading photos and photos taken with old/bad equipment.”

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Portals of London: urban exploration to discover gateways to alternative universe

Salim Fadhley writes, “Portals of London, an urban exploration blog, presents an alternative geography of London. It’s a catalog of the weird, decrepit and slightly crumpled – things the author posits might plausibly be portals to alternative universes, but then again might not.”
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