A Nomadic Life: By Photographer Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a professional photographer as well as a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia. Seeing the opportunity to create a single important collection concentrating on the last country where the majority of the population are still nomads, Sardar-Afkhami set up a mobile studio camp. With his arsenal of cameras of different formats, he mounts yearly expeditions into the Mongolian outback to document her nomadic traditions.













Tracking the white reinder from hamid sardar on Vimeo.

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Crossing the Line: Chronicling Mexico's Drug War ~ by Photographer Louie Palu

Canadian photojournalist Louie Palu discusses his work along the U.S.-Mexico border. He shares how he became interested in the area, the difficulties that came with reporting there, and what surprised him most. His project, “Drawing the Line: The U.S.-Mexico Border” examines security and immigration issues along the border.

Luis Avila Archulata, 40, who crossed the border into Arizona with his mother at age 2. He became a drug addict and was jailed multiple times before being deported. He is pictured in a shelter in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012.

A woman who was found beating herself in Ciudad Juárez, seen here in another shelter in the city. Due to a lack of state resources, the privately run shelter provides a refuge for mentally ill homeless people. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012.

Deported men of Mexican and Central American origin pray before a meal at a shelter for migrants who have been deported from the United States or are preparing to attempt to illegally cross into the United States from Mexico. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012

Marisol Espinoza, a 20-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico, in a migrant shelter the night after she was deported from the United States. Espinoza walked through the Arizona desert for six days before she was arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol. Image by © Louie Palu  Mexico, 2012.

During a March operation to find El Fantasma, the head assassin of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, the Mexican military shot and killed this heavily armed man in Quila, Mexico, in the state of Sinaloa. El Fantasma remains at large. Image by © Louie Palu. Mexico, 2012.

A heroin addict shoots up along the Tijuana River in Mexico. Image by 

© Louie Palu Mexico, 2012.

Girls praying at a crime scene in Ciudad Juárez in December 2011, just hours after a teenager was assassinated by a rival drug cartel. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012

A U.S. drug enforcement agent peering into a 55-foot-deep drug-smuggling tunnel found nearuma, Arizona, in July. The tunnel, possibly tied to the Sinaloa cartel, runs some 750 feet under the border and is estimated to have cost more than $1 million. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012. 

An agent aims a flashlight down the tunnel, which is 240 yards long. The tunnel was cut through a floor of a small industrial unit and is estimated to have taken a year to build. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012.

At the western end of the line for the border fence, in the Pacific Ocean near Tijuana. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012.

A migrant who walked for days through the Arizona desert lies down in a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico after being deported by U.S. authorities. One of the top injuries migrants sustain is severe blistering on their feet from walking in the desert in the heat. Image by © Louie Palu Mexico, 2012

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Making of the Ford "Invisible" Car shoot with Jeff Ludes and Liu Bolin

Watch automotive photographer Jeff Ludes in action, as he shoot magnificent print ads for the new Ford Fusion downtown Los Angeles. Working under the Ford brand concept, "go further", Jeff Ludes and his team worked towards creating art, not just an ad.

Watch how he uses the skills of Chinese street artist Liu Bolin and the image quality of the IQ160 and IQ180. "So, this is a little different than what we usually do. What we do is, we get our camera angle, we put everything in place, plot out the hero car, we will shoot a blank frame, put the cars back in and then superimpose those on each other.

 We set up our grid work, they paint those in matching textures. For example, the colors need to be accurate." "We have got this digital back that is incredibly precise, incredibly sharp detail, and I think it is only going to enhance the effect."



Making of the Ford Fusion "Invisible" photo shoot with Jeff Ludes and Liu Bolin from Jeff Ludes on Vimeo.


Liu Bolin and Jeff Ludes

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Grassroots Effort To Save Photos Damaged by Hurricane Sandy

The Brooklyn-based nonprofit "Care for Sandy" has emerged as one of the critical grassroots groups helping residents impacted by Hurricane Sandy save some of their most cherished memories.

From the CARE for Sandy website:
CARE stands for Cherished Albums Restoration Effort. Our mission is simple: to offer FREE digital restoration services for individuals and families whose salvaged photos have been damaged by October's devastating hurricane. Why? Because cars, homes and jobs are replaceable, whereas images of baby’s first Christmas, mom & dad’s wedding day and great great grandpa’s sole surviving portrait are not. Photos contain personal meaning. Photos preserve stories! Photos foster priceless soul and spirit. CARE for Sandy aims to offer restoration services for at least one year. Spread the word and visit our website to learn more!

Swing on over the the Care for Sandy facebook page and show some love.

 Restored by: Dalton Portella, Montauk, New York. 
The most dramatic CARE for Sandy restoration to date. The damaged photograph had to be pried out of its picture frame.

 

Restored by: Boris Polonsky, Florham Park, New Jersey. 
A family brought in this honeymoon picture to be restored. It’s the only remaining photograph they have of their mom. 

Restored by: Boris Polonsky, Florham Park, New Jersey. 
A family brought a wet, super stinky clump of photographs to be restored, including this favorite snap of Brad Pitt taken back in the nineties. The photographs were so stinky that the volunteers had to wear face masks and use fans.

Restored by: Tim Barnes, Bedford, Texas. 
This is a picture from Al and Terry Fabiano’s wedding day, featuring the song they first danced to as husband and wife. Their wedding album was submerged in flood water. 

Restored by: Jean Thornhill, Stoke Edith, England. 
The Sullivan family, from a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., threw away their photographs after giving up hope of ever having them restored. They quickly retrieved them when they found out about CARE for Sandy. 

This image was restored by volunteer Billy L. for Pat Gallagher of Queens. The young man is her husband. 

This is the house that Candice Roy built, all the way from Oklahoma City. Not only did she remove the image's mold and restore its color, she provided a second architectural story! The Rockaway Park family this treasure belongs to wishes to remain respectfully anonymous.

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National Geographic: The Last Roll of Kodachrome

They give us those nice bright colors 

They give us the greens of summers 

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day,

 Oh yeah I got a Nikon camera 

I love to take a photograph

So mama don't take my Kodachrome away 

Paul Simon, 1973

 Photographer and National Geographic contributor Steve McCurry doesn't want his Kodachrome taken away.

He's taken over 800,000 photos taken with the film — including his most famous one. When McCurry's arresting shot of an Afghan girl in Pakistan was featured on the cover of National Geographic in 1985, the subject's gazing green eyes captured the world's attention. It could not have been created without Kodachrome.

 After spending almost 30 years shooting with Kodachrome, McCurry equates losing the medium to losing a dear friend. He has been given the chance to take one more roll — just 36 frames — for the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. He'll continue traveling around the world, looking for shots that will be best captured in the exceptional colors of Kodachrome. [via NPR]

Afghan Girl, 1985 ~ Steve McCurry

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Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Turned Into a Photograph ~ by Tadao Cern

Photographer Tadao Cern took one of  Vincent Van Gogh's most famous self-portraits and used some Photoshop magic recreate it as a still photograph. Pretty remarkable job I must say!



Here is Van Gogh's original self portrait. It was painted in 1889 and hangs at The Musee d'Orsay in Paris
(I was lucky enough to see it in person.)

The photographic transformation in progress

tadaocern.com

The final photograph of Van Gogh created by Tadao Cern

tadaocern.com

"I recreated one of the most famous Vincent Van Gogh self portraits as a photography using DSLR and ‘some’ Photoshop tricks. The idea came spontaneously – I saw my friend that has ginger hair and beard and thought that it would be very funny to make a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. He liked the idea and a week later we met in my studio. After some preparation work we made few shots and after a day of editing the final image I posted it on the Internet. At the moment I have no plans to make something similar but who knows:) I think that this only one image stand quite good for himself as a project already. Funny that a lot of people are confused by the image. Some of them keep asking me if there’s really a guy that looks so alike Van Gogh. Some of them don’t believe that it’s a photo at all. And some of them thought that I really took a picture of Vincent Van Gogh." ~ Tadao Cern


Here is a short video of the Photoshop process Cern painstakingly undertook to achieve the uncanny result.
Revealing The Truth from Tadao Cern on Vimeo.


"First of all, I needed a model with red hair. Than we the help of a stylist we recreated the outfit. And then after basic composition shot I took a lot of detail shots which where incorporated in the main image. It was a lot of cloning, stretching, drawing, pushing, lifting. It was almost as painting a new image looking at the reference and original painting standing next to me." ~ Tadao Cern

Here is a cool video merging all of Van Gogh's self Portraits

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Movie Stills of New York Locations Juxtaposed with Real Life

Journalist Christopher Moloney had an epiphany while walking through Central Park one day,  “Every day I walked past tons of locations from popular—and not-so-popular—movies,” he explains. He decided to start printing out stills from the films and comparing them to their real-life counterparts. “Since then, I’ve re-created more than 250 scenes around the city.” His work—which includes movies as varied as Midnight Run, The French Connection, and Shaft—can be found at his Web site, FILMography.

“I’m actually surprised that locations used in the 1940s and 1950s haven’t changed that much,” he says. “But places used in movies last year are virtually unrecognizable.” New York also changes depending on the director, Moloney adds. “You can tell just how much filmmakers like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee love the city. It’s sometimes hard to believe that those three very different places are all the same city.” [via Vanity Fair]

Léon: The Professional, 1994

Christopher Moloney/Filmography

Annie Hall, 1977

"Whenever I see a movie and there's a bookstore scene, I get very sad, because that bookstore is probably gone," Moloney says. "I could never recreate that."

Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961.

The Dark Knight Rises, 2012.

The Royal Tennenbaums, 2001

The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

Leon the Professional, 1994

The French Connection, 1971

The Naked City, 1948

I Am Legend, 2007

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, 1992

Vanilla Sky, 2001

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