1940s NYC | Street photos of every building in New York City in 1939/1940
Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map. Zoom in! Every dot is a photo.
With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places.
Xavi Bou focuses on birds, his great passion, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible.
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Technology, science and creativity combine to create evocative images which show the sensuality and beauty of the bird’s movements and which are, at the same time, clues for those wishing to identify or recognize them.
Aric Toler: Guide to Using Reverse Image Search for Investigations (Bellingcat)
Reverse image search engines have progressed dramatically over the past decade, with no end in sight. Along with the ever-growing amount of indexed material, a number of search giants have enticed their users to sign up for image hosting services, such as Google Photos, giving these search algorithms an endless amount of material for machine learning. On top of this, facial recognition AI is entering the consumer space with products like FindClone and may already be used in some search algorithms, namely with Yandex. There are no publicly available facial recognition programs that use any Western social network, such as Facebook or Instagram, but perhaps it is only a matter of time until something like this emerges, dealing a major blow to online privacy while also (at that great cost) increasing digital research functionality.
If you skipped most of the article and are just looking for the bottom line, here are some easy-to-digest tips for reverse image searching:
• Use Yandex first, second, and third, and then try Bing and Google if you still can’t find your desired result.
• If you are working with source imagery that is not from a Western or former Soviet country, then you may not have much luck. These search engines are hyper-focused on these areas, and struggle for photographs taken in South America, Central America/Caribbean, Africa, and much of Asia.
• Increase the resolution of your source image, even if it just means doubling or tripling the resolution until it’s a pixelated mess. None of these search engines can do much with an image that is under 200×200.
• Try cropping out elements of the image, or pixelating them if it trips up your results. Most of these search engines will focus on people and their faces like a heat-seeking missile, so pixelate them to focus on the background elements.
• If all else fails, get really creative: mirror your image horizontally, add some color filters, or use the clone tool on your image editor to fill in elements on your image that are disrupting searches.
Jia Tolentino: The Creepiest Pictures on the Internet (The New Yorker)
Jia Tolentino speaks with the mysterious administrator of the Cursed Images Twitter account, and considers what makes the images there so creepy.
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Knowing the stories behind the cursed images does not always make them less creepy. “Cursed image 1783,” showing a woman encased in medical equipment with balloons wreathing her face, is from an Associated Press story about a woman in Memphis who died after a power failure shut off the iron lung she’d lived inside for almost sixty years. “Cursed image 1627,” showing a terrible plasticine figure in a waste-green pool, is from a Daily Beast story about a seventy-year-old man named Robert whose pastime is dressing up as a life-size doll. These images hew to the Freudian description of the uncanny: a sense that something once familiar has become terribly strange. Seeing a flock of flamingos crammed into a dirty public bathroom is uncomfortable, whether you know that the photo was taken at the Miami Zoo during Hurricane Andrew or not.
Gregg Segal tells us what it was like to take these absolutely bananas photos.
You know, the ones of the soulless hateful scumbag Paul Ryan in workout clothes and a backwards hat looking like a goofball?
Self-hosted photo-management done right. Lychee is a free photo-management tool, which runs on your server or web-space. Installing is a matter of seconds. Upload, manage and share photos like from a native application. Lychee comes with everything you need and all your photos are stored securely.
Taylor Lorenz: There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl (The Atlantic)
Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.
Beyond pointing out the fact that the original tweet is a sensational fabrication designed to spark outrage—which is really unfortunate and bad!—this argument seems too simplistic, too much of a “Actually you're wrong, this is fine and how we do things now” hot take.
Sure, one can take selfies at sites of tragedy, but we can also question and examine how this all came to be: What is an ‘influencer?’ What effects do they have on audiences and subjects? Is this ‘ruin porn?’ How does publicly available life-documentation (i.e. Instagram) differ from the limited availability of the personal printed photo album of the past?
Alexis C. Madrigal: No, You Don’t Really Look Like That (The Atlantic)
Since the 19th century, cameras have been able to capture images at different speeds, wavelengths, and magnifications, which reveal previously hidden worlds. What’s fascinating about the current changes in phone photography is that they are as much about revealing what we want to look like as they are investigations of the world. It’s as if we’ve discovered a probe for finding and sharing versions of our faces—or even ourselves—and it’s this process that now drives the behavior of the most innovative, most profitable companies in the world.
Nature photographer should capture the true essence of wildlife, not forcing the poor animals to hold an umbrella, dance or do kungfu. The nature is beautiful and interesting as it is. We believe in the true beauty of nature, not fabricated, posed photo at the expense of animal rights.
Welcome to birdWalker, a website of birding photos and trip reports by Bill Walker and Mary Wisnewski, California birders based in Santa Clara County. We've been collecting our trip reports since 1996, we have now recorded 857 trips and 784 species.
50 stock photos of real people for UI design and business presentations. High-res, easy-to-use, royalty-free and rights-cleared! Compared to traditional stock photography, it's a no-brainer.