VIA PDN | FREE DIVE HUNTERS

Ren Chapman prepares for a dive with a loaded and ready speargun while another diver rests, holding onto a dive-line to stay in position against the current. (Via PDN | © Eyeconic Images.)Anyone who has seen The Big Blue (1988) would love this photoset. I credit that film with being the reason I booked the archaeological work in Greece and the reason why, when I am there I spend all my time training to free dive. I have yet to do it with anything other than a mask and swimshorts. But soon... I'd love to do a project on free diving.     

Kiteboarding Video | Best Kiteboarding + Paul Porter

I made a video last month of my brother Paul Porter kiteboarding at our local spot, Jetty Island near Seattle, WA. He just joined the BEST Kiteboarding team as a national rider and we decided to make this as a little promo for them. 

VIA | PERSPECTIVES

I am constantly charmed and thrilled by BLDGBLOG – this post is no exception. I love the idea that a blog concerned with "architectural conjecture," would be interested in the developments of photography. This post relates a bit to the DepthEditorDebug project I've been collaborating on recently. In it, he goes from bullet time to Velasquez and back again. But what captivates me is that if he gets to write about photography, then I get to write about architecture... damnit! 

BLDGBLOG: Split Infinitives:

A digital image-processing system under development since 2007 will allow photographers "to artificially create photos taken from a perspective where there was no photographer." It uses "a computer-vision technique called view synthesis to combine two or more photographs to create another very realistic-looking one that looks like it was taken from an arbitrary viewpoint," as New Scientist explains.

'AIR IN THE SQUARE' BMX/SKATE COMPETITION, TIMES SQUARE

My dear friend Agatha asked me to shoot this skate competition in Times Square for BNQT. It was a lot of fun– there were some total action sports idols there (Kelly Slater, Bob Burnquist, Andy MacDonald etc.) and was a really impressive vert event. I had a really good time hiding in the gaps between the jumps and shooting up at the riders. Go to the gallery at BNQT.com – photos & a diagram of the ramps after the break...   

Click to read more ...

NEW WORK ON SITE | DEPTH_EDITOR_DEBUG

This is an excerpt of our submission materials for ENTER5, an Art, Science & Technology Biennial in Prague. All the materials are the product of a collaboration with James George:

In October of 2010, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave the keynote speech concluding the Vimeo Festival + Awards in New York. He described his predictions for the future of imaging technology. Regarding how a camera of the future may function, Sterling said:

"It simply absorbs every photon that touches it from any angle. And then in order to take a picture I simply tell the system to calculate what that picture would have looked like from that angle at that moment. I just send it as a computational problem out in to the cloud wirelessly."

One month later, Microsoft released their new video game controller, the XBOX Kinect. Kinect is unique in that it uses a depth sensing camera and computer vision software to sense the position and actions of gamers. A group of developers released an Open Source device driver that allowed programmers to access the Kinectʼs data on a personal computer.

Visualizations of space as seen through Kinectʼs sensors can be computed from any angle using 3D software. When the drivers were made available, online creative software developer communities were flooded with artistic and novel interpretations of this data. The images were often characterized by depictions of people as clouds of dots and wireframes representing human figures moving in time.

In mid-2005, six weeks after the tragic subway and bus bombings in London, New Yorkʼs Metro Transit Authority (MTA) signed a contract with the high-tech defense and military technology giant Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin promised the MTA a hightech surveillance system driven by computer vision and artificial intelligence systems. The security system turned out to be vaporware and the contract collapsed under lawsuits. As a result, thousands of security cameras in the New York subway stations sit unused.

It is in this technological atmosphere that we chose to collaborate. We soldered together an inverter and motorcycle batteries to run the laptop and Kinect sensor on the go. We attached a Canon 5D DSLR to the sensor and plugged it in to a laptop. The entire kit went into a backpack.

We spent an evening in the New York Union Square subway capturing high resolution stills and and archiving depth data of pedestrians. We wrote an openFrameworks application to combine the data, allowing us to place fragments of the two dimensional images into three dimensional space, navigate through the resulting environment and render the output.

These prints are selected renderings from this process.

Sources:
Video of Sterlingʼs Talk (relevant portion is from around 00:40:00 onward)
WNYC.org on MTA & Lockheed Martin
Original OpenKinect driver repository
The openFrameworks creative coding developer environment

GREAT NEWS | DEPTH_EDITOR_DEBUG IN PRAGUE ART SHOW

As many of you know I have been working on a really fruitful, ongoing collaboration with my good friend James George.

I'm excited to announce that we were recently invited to show prints from the series we have been working on with the Xbox Kinect at ENTER5, an international art, science & technology biennale in Prague hosted by the International Center for Art & New Technologies (CIANT) and the National Technical Library (NTK).

CHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY [DIGITAL]

This is a filler for a little piece I've been meaning to write on chronophotography past & present... 
http://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/digital-chronophotography-processing/

SPACESUITS | A SPACE WARDROBE

There is a great interactive feature at the New York Times featuring images of a series of 21 spacesuits including Xrays of the various parts and a great article. They're part of the Smithsonian Collection and are purportedly part of an exhibition to come some time this year.

ANTHROPOMETRY & MUG SHOTS | ALPHONSE BERTILLON

This is adendum to my series on crime scene and forensic photography. French photographer Alphonse Bertillon is credited as the father of the mug shot. He focused on measuring and photographing physical characteristics of criminals in France at the time allowing the police departments to identify repeating offenders. It should be acknowledged that he also had a parralel interest in biometry in the interest of eugenics and racial profiling; but some of his contributions to the relationship between photography and criminology are still used today.

PRESS | NEW SCIENTIST ON KINECT PROJECT

We were featured in a neat little piece on interesting Kinect hacks on New Scientist. There's also a cool one on there to help surgeons to navigate through 3D views of organs during surgery. 

Update on Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 6:05PM by Alexander Porter

We are also proud to have been featured recently on CreativeApplications.net.

INTERACTIVE PHOTO BOOKLET | BEHIND THE SCENES WITH IMAGE SOURCE

Here is a little booklet made by James Nord at Image Source who came along on three of my shoots with his company last fall. He put together a publicity booklet called INPUT that documents shoots from myself and one other photographer of theirs. In here you'll see the amazing Teddy Telles working with me and Samantha Mitchell one of the great art directors from IS on set with us. In here you'll see a shoot we did on a vineyard/horse rescue farm and one in an apartment in Brooklyn.

Click on the image to the left to turn the pages.

PHOTO CONFERENCE | THE PHOTOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE @ PARSONS

Coming up on the 2nd/3rd of April there is a conference at Parsons on the topic of photography. It is free and open to the public. I think that there will be some interesting discussions going on there. I am hoping that the discussions and presentations will go beyond the observations that I seem to be hearing everywhere lately: we "are innundated with photographs" or that "our world is so saturated with images that we no longer see" etc. Anyway, come and hear for yourself! 

About | The Photographic Universe:

The field of photography is constantly changing. Technologies, theories, and what constitutes a 'photographer' or a 'photograph' are prone to unending developments. In the last decade, this rapid transformation has only accelerated due to pervasive digitization. Paradoxically, one might say that photography is now in a similar place to where it was during the first few decades of its invention–a time when its emerging cultural significance quickly expanded due to innovative technological developments. Similarly, in the last two decades, we have seen an expanding definition of photography through the digital revolution, the Internet, and the accelerated stream of interest in new photographic processes and applications. Thus, it is important to reflect on this current moment – with the rapidly increasing permeation of photography throughout contemporary life – on what is the importance of photography as a specific medium or discipline from the perspective of a practitioner, user, pedagogue, technologist, historian, among others. Furthermore, how can we evaluate contemporary culture within the expanding photographic field while speculating the future of images? The Photographic Universe: A Conference will attempt to answer these questions through broad artistic, scientific, cultural, sociopolitical arcs to examine the implications of images in contemporary life. The event is free and open to the public.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
The Theresa Lang Center
55 W 13th Street
March 2-3 

Starts at 9:00am with coffee & bagels.

Update on Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 6:09PM by Alexander Porter

I really enjoyed this! More details to come.

Bálint Rádóczy PROJECTION PHOTOS

Skinscapes / Projection via Photography Served:

Skinscapes / Projection Created by projecting self-made graphics onto the model, this series is meant to provide an almost purely aesthetic approach to visuality whilst dealing with a subject that outlines the true nature of photography itself. 

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY NOW: THE INSTRUCTIONS

Street Photography Now - Telegraph:

"No better advice has ever been given to street photographers than that offered by Walker Evans, one of the greatest American photographers of the mid-twentieth century: 'Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."
The above text has been extracted from the book 'Street Photography Now' by Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, available from Thames & Hudson for £29.95. Street Photography Now: The Instructions

The Street Photography Now Project is a yearlong collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of Street Photography Now, inviting photographers from around the world to reassess and record the world we live in. To take part click here.

DISFARMER PROJECT

Music inspired by photography is not unheard of. Film scores, for one, rely heavily on visuals to tell a musical narrative, as the story in turn relies on the music. Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell has taken the idea to another level with a new album Disfarmer, inspired by the lifetime photographic corpus of Mike Disfarmer.

Disfarmer seems an unusual name — and that's because the man made it up. Born Michael Meyer to immigrant German parents in 1884, he changed his name to indicate a rift with both his kin and his agrarian surroundings — believing Meyer to be German for "farmer." This alone might set him apart as singularly unusual, but his vocation as a small town portraitist in Heber Springs, Ark. estranged him still further from his farming contemporaries.
All text respectfully stolen from NPR.org

Spend some time with the album (left) and this. Also there is a beautiful slideshow in the references. A great project!

Milk Kanye Shoot

Regardless of what you think of the result of this shoot – it is a little underwhelming for me – the technique is a bit of a milestone. Without further ado, Kanye by Chris Milk. The video is strictly for some insight on the technique, the commentary is a bit hokey.

SNOWFLAKES: Wilson Alwyn Bentley.

Bentley with snowflake camera. Bentley Collection. Scientist’s understanding of snow crystals owes a great debt of thanks to a 19 year old farmer living in Vermont in 1885 by the name of Wilson Alwyn Bentley. Fascinated by the snow crystals and their composition this man was the first person to successfully produce a photograph of snow or ice crystals. He did this by magnifying the crystals he gathered at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates.

Bentley devised his own camera at a time when photography was raw, new and rare. He attached bellows to the microscope, along with wood splints, turkey feathers and a black board. Through the images he captured he discovered that every ice crystal is unique and grows symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a tiny nucleus. Whether the growing shape from that nucleus becomes concentric or dendritic [branching] depends on various factors including temperature and water content.

Schwerdtfeger Library has a vast selection of photomicrographs of snow crystals, prepared sets of glass lantern slides of dew, frost and ice crystals

Capturing the snowflake: Wilson Alwyn Bentley 1865-1931 | Drawn Association

ICE | BYRD GLACIER

A web of cracks in meltwater ice near the edge of Byrd Glacier. Credit: John Goodge

PUBLISHED: IMAGE SOURCE DOES BABA, BK

I was published recently (01/15) in the Guardian alongside an article about the contemporary relationship to media etc. Forgive the ratty scan. This was part of a shoot for Image Source, which is a stock agency I've been working with recently that specializes in high-end beauty, lifestyle and business images. It was part of a shoot at Baba a local Brooklyn restaurant that has sadly since closed. The art director I worked with was Dawn Bauer at IS and the producer was Agatha Wasilewska.

Update on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 6:04PM by Alexander Porter

NYMag's GrubStreet rather boldly posted an uncredited photo from this shoot on their site announcing the opening of a new restaurant in the same location. 

PHOTOGRAPHERS HAVE MORE FUN!

My dear bud Jen (www.galafoto.net) came over for dinner and wrote the kindest post on her food blog Morta Di Fame about the experience. We had Japanese and Swedish nibbles. 

Hama preps some amazing pasta she served with sea urchins and shiso pesto.